Madame Joy

Chapter ______________

Charlie was an asshole.

No one in the high school liked him. He was rude, often mean, frequently crass, loud, vulgar, and at times violent. There were holes in other people’s houses where Charlie had punched the walls. He was awkward- tall and strong like a man but cursed with the complexion of a thirteen year old boy. His body had gotten stuck in a cruel purgatory. While his friends developed attention-grabbing muscles, alluring hair, killer smiles, and suave personalities, Charlie grew man-sized but was burdened with a face full of pimples, pasty skin, dirty blonde spiky hair that couldn’t choose which direction to jet, and a voice that cracked at its own unpredictable whim. Everything seemed to undermine the masculinity he desperately wanted to assert. Unable to compete with his more desirable buddies, who were all being sought after by at least two girls, Charlie embraced his not-so-good looks, adopted a bad-boy attitude, and took up chewing tobacco.

Savina had a crush on him.

No one understood it. She couldn’t explain it, but she could feel him. At one of the two parties Savina had managed to sneak out to that year, she peered into and around a cracked fist-shaped imprint Charlie had made seconds earlier in a white plaster wall. In the back of the room behind the crowd of beer can-toting teenagers, she heard a drunk Charlie slobber loudly. He was yelling after one of the popular girls in the class a year below Savina’s. “Tell that girl to come sit on my face!” Savina had never heard such an expression. It seemed to allude to something sexual, yet sounded almost threatening. The girl, looking slightly flattered but mostly terrified, was swooped up and hurried away by a protective encasement of her friends. “Would you just…just let me…I just want to eat that girl,” Charlie explained as his friends tackled him in an effort to shut him up. Savina watched. Even in his vulgarity he seemed somehow earnest. He fascinated her. 

Savina was not someone Charlie would have noticed, except that they had fourth period Latin class together, after lunch. Charlie played lacrosse and soccer and he and a few other jock-type boys were in this same Latin class with Savina, a couple of her friends, and three really nerdy girls. This mottled group had taken Latin together since seventh grade. Her school was like that. The kids could be jocks, drunks, sluts, and jerks, but they were all smart. Savina also played lacrosse. It was a beautiful sport. She liked running. She had run track in middle school and got a bunch of first place prizes in the yearly track meet. In her freshman year of high school, she decided to try lacrosse. It was a graceful sport filled with tall girls with long legs who were nice. They weren’t rich girls like the tennis team, or girls who grew up playing together like the soccer team, they were just girls who wanted to play lacrosse. Savina fit in best there, if anywhere. 

The boys and girls lacrosse teams wanted to spend the upcoming Spring break in Bermuda. The teams from a couple of other local schools were going and they would train and play together. The rich kids in the school could all pay for their expenses and by some miracle Savina’s school insisted that either everyone from the team who wanted to go went on the trip or no one went at all. So the rich kids held bake sales, rummage sales, and babysat to raise money so that everyone could go on the trip. Savina babysat once and brought food to the bake sales, but for the most part she didn’t try very hard. She doubted she was going on this trip. Her parents barely let her out of the house on the weekends unless she was going to her volunteer job or orchestra practice. They didn’t like her leaving the house to babysit, but for some reason they didn’t complain that she was only babysitting to raise money for her ticket to Bermuda. It didn’t seem to sink in with her parents that she was asking to board a plane and fly across an ocean to live on an island for a week with forty teenagers. When it did sink in, she didn’t think there was any way her parents were actually going to let her go. They did.

Savina was one of two ninth-graders on the trip. There were a handful of sophomores, but mostly the kids were juniors and seniors. The other freshman was a girl who was much more socially savvy, buxom, and liked by the guys on the boys team. Savina sat next to one of the coaches on the plane. She didn’t really have any friends on the trip. Bermuda was beautiful though, and she loved it. The houses were pink, yellow, and peach, the water was a clear and blue, the sky felt infinite and new, and the sand was like fairy dust. It stuck to Savina’s skin and never came off. Tourists zipped around on mopeds, and the locals drove small cars and picked up the older girls who hitch-hiked along the road, hoping the coaches wouldn’t catch them. When Savina called home, her mother told her that her father and she were having trouble. That’s why they had let her go away. Savina worried. Knowing that something was wrong in her family made Bermuda a very strange place to be.

The teams ate dinner together in a big restaurant that was part of the complex where they were staying. It was filled with different sized round tables that were covered by dusty-rose-colored table cloths. They ate three meals a day all together, like a campus dining hall, but with linens, nice silverware, and wait staff. Savina hated going to meals in the restaurant/dining hall. She never knew where to sit, or with whom. One day as Savina lingered by the doorway feeling lost, her coach pointed to a table for two where one girl, a senior, was already sitting by herself. Savina reluctantly wandered to the table and sat down. She remembered three things from that night. Bread, water, and lots of questions. The pale blonde girl interrogated Savina about her skin, her hair and asked her if she was getting tan down here. She wanted to know if it was even possible for Savina or the other black girl who was darker, to get a tan. The questions went on and on like this as the waiter kept delivering bread and water. She felt like she was trapped in a little round, rose-colored prison.

The complex had clusters of one-room multi-bed houses walking distance from the beach in which the students slept in groups of three, four or five. Savina was assigned to a house with a three other girls, four total. Her housemates included the vivacious, larger-than-life varsity goalie. She was tall and substantial, with long flowing wavy orange hair that cascaded down past her shoulders. She was a senior and was charged with mentoring the junior varsity goalie. None of the other positions had a mentor, so the varsity goalie seemed more like a semi-coach. Three beds were on one side of the room and the goalie’s bed on the other. Savina sat on her bed and stared across the room mesmerized as the goalie sat cross legged on her bed. She played the expert in every conversation. The girls started a talking about being athletes. The goalie talked about her body and how she loved stretching, meditation, and yoga which led her to talk about the importance of spirituality and her life as a Quaker. Savina was captivated by how open the goalie was. One of the girls said something about having her period on this trip, which prompted a discussion about tampons, to which the goalie added that she was a “super plus” girl. She was the fullest expression of a woman Savina had ever seen. She was big in every way.

Savina was fifteen and hadn’t ever used a tampon. She had gotten her first period when she was twelve and a half, while her eldest sister was at college and her middle sister had been sent away by her parents, the first time. When she told her mother about becoming a woman, her mom, turned from watching the television and said two things. “Well, you better go tell your father,” and “Everything you need is upstairs in the cabinet under the sink. Do you know what to do?” That last part wasn’t a real question. Saying “I don’t know” wasn’t an option in her family, so Savina said yes and went upstairs to figure things out with the help of the pamphlet her doctor had given her called Nine to Twelve Year Olds.

One night in Bermuda the girls and boys went to a club down the street from the complex where they were staying. There had been a band playing, and music was filling the spaces between the sets. Next door to the dance floor where the band’s unmanned instruments waited, Savina walked into a room filled with people sitting at tables drinking, smoking cigarettes and bouncing quarters off the tables into full cups of beer. Charlie was there, drunk as he often was. He motioned to Savina. She took a few steps toward him, not sure if his gesture was meant for her. Once she was within his reach, he grabbed her by the waist and with a momentous yank, pulled her toward him. He sat Savina on his right thigh and spun her around so her legs dangled between his. She couldn’t imagine this was on purpose. He couldn’t mean to do that with her. Her? She blushed and smiled awkwardly at his friends who looked at her as surprised as she was.

Charlie talked in slurred drunken words to Savina. He showed her a yellow puss-filled circle on the thick part of the palm of his hand where he had dared himself to extinguish his last cigarette. Everyone was talking about it, they couldn’t believe he had done it. Savina could. Charlie was strong and spontaneous that way. Everyone else was making fun of him and telling him that he was stupid because it was really going to hurt the next day. He didn’t care. Savina stared at the wound. She told him it was kind of cool. “See!” He said to his friends. Charlie smiled and nodded at her. Suddenly, he jumped to his feet. A song he liked had started playing in the next room. He pulled Savina into the music to dance.

I wanna love you,
and treat you right.
I wanna love you,
every day and every night.
We’ll be together,
with the roof right over our head.
We’ll share the shelter,
of our single bed…

Charlie played with Savina as the song bopped and bobbed with a reggae beat. He mumbled the words in her ear, his eyes half shut from his buzz. He pushed her away, twirled her around, and pulled her back again. He asked her questions about herself that she didn’t remember the answers to. After three minutes and fifty-one seconds, the song ended. Savina thought Charlie would leave to move on to another girl or go back to his friends, drinks, and cigarettes. She wondered where she would go. She glanced at a table a few yards away that was full of girls. She thought she might be able to sit with them once Charlie had discarded her. A new song started. It was slow. Charlie pulled Savina close to him.

Looking out on the morning rain.
I used to feel so uninspired.
And when I knew I had to face another day.
Lord it made me feel so tired.
Before the day I met you, life was so unkind.
But you’re the key to my peace of mind.

‘Cause you make me feel.
You make me feel.
You make me feel like
A natural woman.

Charlie held her close to him and they swayed. Savina floated on the words of the song. She couldn’t believe the words. She couldn’t believe they were dancing to this song. The other people dancing around them melted into a blur of bodies and staring faces. She felt like everyone was staring at them. It didn’t make her feel wrong or out of place. The circle of stares comforted Savina. She and Charlie were showing the onlookers something new, beautiful, and daring. It was something they didn’t have the courage to make for themselves. Between Charlie and Savina there was a warm enclosed space that broke free from stupid high school social conditions. In this time-and judgment-suspended moment, Charlie could choose her. Savina’s heart beat hard and she leaned into Charlie’s chest. She buried her head in the muscles of his shoulders. He cradled his arm in the small of her back. They said nothing. Silence. Song. Sway.

Oh, baby, what you’ve done to me
You make me feel so good inside
And I just want to be
Close to you
You make me feel so alive

After a few more choruses, the song ended. Savina remained in a daze. Now Charlie went back to the boys. She sat down at the table of girls. They asked her why, and how, and what it was like to dance with Charlie who was such an asshole. Savina didn’t hear them. She didn’t care. She wasn’t there. She breathed short puffs of breath– out. She stared at the center of the dance floor. She watched herself in Charlie’s arms.

On the last night of the week, the boys and girls lacrosse teams had a bonfire party on the beach. The students had been bugging the coaches for some freedom and finally the coaches had rewarded them with some co-ed, curfew-free, we’re-gonna-turn-our-backs-for-one-night, party time. That meant drinking as much as they liked, and pursuing the sexual tensions that had been building between various boys and girls all week. Savina didn’t want to go to the party. She didn’t know anyone any better than when they arrived a week ago and she didn’t really know how to party. She did wonder if she might be missing another chance to dance with Charlie, but there was a better chance that he hadn’t remembered that he had danced with Savina at all. He had been pretty drunk, drunk enough to put a cigarette out on his hand and not feel any pain.

No one had said anything about their dancing together in the three days since it happened. Not Savina or Charlie, or any of the other kids. Their dance couldn’t have meant as much to Charlie as it did to her. If she saw him dancing with another girl then their dance would have to mean less to her too. On the slighter chance that Charlie did like Savina, what if he wanted something more? Savina wouldn’t know what to do if that happened. She had not kissed a boy yet. Replaying their dance over and over in her head was enough. The moment was perfect that way. Savina walked in the opposite direction of the beach fires and sounds of screaming teenagers. She headed to the restaurant to get a cup of tea.

The dusty rose-pink tablecloth covered room was dimly lit and mostly empty. There was one waiter cleaning the kitchen and dealing with anyone who came in. Savina asked him for a cup of tea, then turned to look around the room. A few feet away, sitting at a small table by himself was one of the guys from the boy’s lacrosse team. Praveen was Charlie’s best friend, one of the ones who had made it closer to manhood in looks and maturity than Charlie. Savina had heard that he had gotten hit in the head pretty hard during practice that day. This was extra dangerous because, rumor had it, three concussions was a deadly combination. Praveen had already suffered a concussion the previous Autumn in a football game. Now he had gotten another minor concussion here on the trip. Tonight he couldn’t drink alcohol and he had to stay awake. All the kids were saying that if he fell asleep he might slip into a coma or even die.

Savina thought that staying awake in fear for his life must have been kind of scary for Praveen or, at the very least, pretty boring. It seemed sad to Savina that he was sitting alone drinking coffee while his friends partied. Why wasn’t one of them keeping him company? She got her tea from the waiter, and turned back to the dining room. Savina paused, uncertain of what Praveen thought of her. His best friend had thought she was alright for a few minutes. Savina figured that talking to her was probably better than sitting by himself drinking coffee all night trying not to fall asleep or die. Savina asked him if he wanted some company. Praveen said sure. She sat across from him at the table for two.

Savina drank her tea and Praveen drank his coffee. They talked. Was he really going to die if he fell asleep? Yeah, he thought so. He was afraid to tell his parents, so he hadn’t called home about it. Are you going to be able to keep playing when we get back to school? Probably, he hoped so. He liked sports but they seemed kind of risky now. He might be concussion-prone. Didn’t he want to go to the beach party, even if he couldn’t drink? No, he’d had enough partying for the week. He didn’t trust himself or his friends to keep him sober. How long was he going to sit there? All night, he guessed.

Two years later, he asked her on a date.
Praveen was Savina’s first boyfriend.

In The Singularity I am experimenting with the idea of a modular story. The idea is that the chapters can be read in any order at any time, mixed and moved and still give the reader a moving experience, perhaps even a deeper connection with the story.

Memory is rarely retrieved in linear tracks, so it’s actually quite artificial to write a memoir-based novella in a linear time frame, although we do it all the time. In my stories, side-stories and detours pop up all the time. That’s the way memory works. That’s the way we have to process information in order to get a clear idea of the complexity of history. Every important event in history has had a handful of significant backroom deals, relationships and conversations in order to make it happen. That’s the way I tell a story. I want to let you in on all the backroom deals.

And this novella is also being written in this same way. I write the chapters as they come to me. I don’t know what order they should be presented in yet, if any. It’s my suspicion, my hope that they can create their own relatedness in any order.

I may give each module some kind of identifying marker or title or word just to aid in the selection moving and tracking of what’s been read, but even this feels heavy handed. If i choose one word, or idea from each module/chapter, it draws your attention to that element in the story. In reality, no one element is more important than another. No one chapter is about one thing.  In memory sometimes multiple things have equal weight. I don’t want to choose for a reader what is important or what you should pay the most attention to.

As I experiment with this format, experiment with your reading. As you read them, in whatever order, tell me how they speak to you and to each other.

Thank you for your eyes, your ears, and your hearts.

damali

Chapter _________

Those people you call your friends don’t love you. They might tell you they love you but they don’t. You think they care about you but you are wrong. They don’t care about you. The only people you can count on is your family. If you don’t watch how you act, if you don’t treat your family better, you won’t have anybody. No one else cares about you. Not those people you call your friends.

Savina stared at her mother’s iconic barely-legible handwriting scrawled on three pages of yellow legal paper in blue ballpoint pen. The papers rustled in her shaking hand. Savina reached out her other hand to brace herself against her yard-sale desk in her tiny studio apartment a few blocks from her university where she was about to begin her senior year of college. The futon bed she had bought second-hand was behind her and as she stepped back her foot hit the edge of the bed and she sank.

Savina had been late sending a birthday card. Her mother felt that this was an indication that Savina put other people before her family. She wanted to make sure that Savina would not do that again. Savina’s mom had said these kinds of things to her before, but this time her mother put her thoughts into writing and sent them through the mail. It made her words feel more official, more permanent. As a teenager, Savina had accepted the possibilities her mother insisted on, that her schoolteachers didn’t really care about her and were manipulating her to damage her mother’s reputation. She could have lived with that. Now she had to consider that maybe no one in her life loved her at all.

Her mother, by definition, loved her more than anyone else on the planet could possibly love her. She had Savina’s best interest at heart. She said these things to her because she loved her. No one else would be honest with her. No one else would tell her the truth. No one else would tell Savina that she was lazy, selfish, negative, and irresponsible. Savina’s mom loved her enough to tell her the truth.

Savina called Jake. Maybe Jake didn’t care about her, but at least he might keep her company. She called him in a flood of tears. She was afraid that if she didn’t show how upset she was, he wouldn’t come. People always told Savina that she was so strong.  People had also said she was too sensitive. She could be overreacting. If she seemed to be a total and complete wreck, maybe that’s why he wouldn’t come. Savina didn’t know how to make herself matter.

Jake said he was about to make some pizza but that he had enough stuff to come over and make it for both of them at her place. He asked her if she had a sauce pan and a wooden spoon. Savina did. Jake said he’d be there in a few minutes.

Jake was one of Savina’s favorite people. He was two years behind her in school but every bit her peer. Actually he was undeniably smarter than she was, which, for Savina, was exciting. He was eighteen. She was twenty. When he turned nineteen, Jake became really depressed. Savina had also  been depressed when she was nineteen. That was the year she slept under the footsteps of the people walking by her sophomore dorm room. Now she was living in her second apartment. She told Jake it was temporary. This particular depression was just a phase called nineteen. They sat in the wide grass median in the middle of the long boulevard and talked for hours about philosophy and life. It was an infinite game. Neither of them debated to win, they engaged to stay engaged.

Savina liked Jake as soon as she met him. She liked his name. It had been her nickname in high school, or rather, she had tried to make it her nickname in high school, but only one of her friends called her by it. She wanted a nickname so badly and she wanted it to be a boy’s name. She chose the name Jake one Sunday as she was making herself a sandwich. Savina loved sandwiches, so she was feeling happy. She reached into the refrigerator for the cheese and it just hit her, Jake. That was going to be her boy-name now. It didn’t take. People gave her funny looks when she told them about it. Savina guessed she just wasn’t the kind of person who had a nickname. or maybe it was just weird to choose your own nickname. Her closest friends called her “S” but she didn’t think that really counted. One of her friends wrote her a note and addressed it to “Ess.” Savina loved that. It only happened once.

There was one other person who called Savina by her chosen nickname.

Savina was sitting on the roof of her friend’s mother’s light-blue station wagon with a few other girls. They were parked outside of a house party for the birthday of a girl from her high school. It was one of the rare occasions when Savina’s parents had let her out of the house. They thought she was staying at a friend’s place, but when she got there she and all her girlfriends piled into the car and went to the party. They weren’t the popular girls, and weren’t friends with the girl who was having the party so they hung around outside among other kids who were also one social strata removed from the birthday girl. The girl’s birthday was on Valentines Day, which was the following Tuesday. Love and stuff was in the air. Savina had on a short tweed skirt and ankle boots and an oversized men’s sport coat. Her legs dangled from the roof of the car over the side windows.

A group of older boys from another school walked by. As they passed the car, one of them stopped. He reached for Savina’s sheer-black-hose-clad legs.
      “Nice legs.” He said. His hands ran up Savina’s legs and back down again.
      “That’s what everyone says!” The other girls on top of the car chimed in. Savina often got whistled at by construction workers when she and her girlfriends walked down the street by their school.
      “What’s your name?” He asked.
      “Jake.” Savina answered as the skin on her legs grew tense and then relaxed inch by inch under his fingers. Savina felt like he was tasting her legs with his hands.
       “Really?” The boy laughed. “Like Jake the Snake?” The boy was referring to a professional wrestler, but Savina didn’t know that until later.
      “Yeah, I guess.” All Savina knew was that Jake and snake rhymed, and she liked snakes. When she was a kid she had a book about them and wanted one as a pet.
      “Why don’t you come down here?” The boy took both his hands ran them all the way up Savina’s legs from the top of her ankle boots to her thighs. He squeezed her gently, then offered his hands in the air to her so she could climb down.     

Savina hopped down off the roof of the car with a sly look in her eye. The boy put his arm around her waist and another around her neck. He pulled her face to his. He opened his mouth slightly and took Savina’s lips in his. Her heart beat harder and she held onto his shoulders. He stuck his tongue inside her mouth. Savina smiled. Her friends watched in wonder. It was her first French kiss.

The real Jake called Savina, “S,” since he was one of her closest friends. Jake was brilliant. He had a soft voice and a quiet demeanor, thoughtful lips and curly hair. His mind was quicker than any she had known and hard as a brick. His thoughts his passions were one and the same and they ran deep throughout his body making his hands have a constant nervous fidget. His quiet demeanor gave way when he became intent. Savina and Jake would argue about anything they could get their minds on. They worked at the same campus job at their University and sat in the slate blue loveseats that faced each other across a coffee table filled with magazines about community service, higher education, and left-wing ideals, bantering about class and race and social justice.

Jake explained to Savina that as a white man, he felt a great deal of pressure to uphold a certain standard. He felt he had few options other than to be what everyone expected him to be. He felt like his choices were limited, especially from his dad. He didn’t feel like being himself was acceptable. It hurt. He acknowledged that this was completely different and perhaps less destructive and painful than the oppression Savina might have felt, but said it was all part of the same problem. He wanted his experience to be acknowledged too. Savina stopped arguing and grew quiet. She looked at Jake pondering an idea she had never considered before. She nodded.

Savina had a weak spot for anyone who could introduce a new idea into her over-active mind. Jake had done it. Savina would be permanently changed in that moment. Not only would she see white men differently, but now she could feel Jake in a way she didn’t feel ordinary people. Jake had entered Savina. His truth was so undeniable that she felt it inside her body. It felt as if a new blood cell had been introduced into her circulation and would be there for the rest of her life. This was a better intercourse than any sex she could imagine.

Jake showed up at Savina’s apartment with tomato sauce, vegetables, cheese and one of those prepared rustic-style pizza crusts that were all the rage. Savina watched as Jake combined vegetables and sauce into a large sauté pan. Savina had always cooked sauce in a pot and watched in amazement as Jake stirred the bubbling sauce that was spewing tiny red specks all over the stove.
      “Do you have any honey?” Jake asked.
      Savina became more fascinated, “What does honey have to do with pizza?”
      “I’m going to use it to cut down the acid in the tomatoes.” Jake replied as he squirted spirals of sticky golden goo from the plastic bottle shaped like a bear into the pan of erupting red sauce. He gave Savina a taste. “See?”

Savina was too sad to taste anything, but it didn’t matter. Jake had implanted another new idea in her head and although this one wasn’t life-changing, or orgasm-inducing, it somehow gave her a renewed sense of hope.

They sat and ate pizza and talked. The tears that Savina had cried earlier made her feel naked. Jake didn’t seem to mind. He told her that her mom’s letter was obviously wrong and just meant to hurt her. Parents of kids like Savina and Jake were always hard on them. Savina nodded. Jake had a point. Maybe other kids got these kinds of letters too. Everyone else seemed to be okay. Savina would find a way to be okay too. Did she have a choice?

Jake and Savina were both in relationships. Savina thought that they were also in love with each other, but for two years they never really talked about it. Then they both graduated from college and broke up with their partners. They went out for dinners where Savina drank too much wine and Jake taught her about crème brûlée. They talked for hours on the phone. They talked about it. Savina wanted to kiss him. She wanted to kiss Jake. That was all she could think about. Jake said Savina had too much time on her hands and should get a job.

Then one day Jake asked Savina to come over to watch a movie, Pulp Fiction. They only made it half way through. They kissed awkwardly and uncertainly. Neither of them knew who should lead. Neither of them were sure if it felt completely right or completely wrong. Jake’s thin lips and coarse skin were not what Savina had imagined. She was sure that parts of her didn’t add up for him either. She and Jake didn’t fit together the way she had been certain they would. Halfway through she wondered why he was kissing her at all.

A year later Jake and Savina were living on different sides of the same big city in the middle of the country. He called her. His ex-girlfriend had started dating someone new. When that happens it feels like your lover is breaking up with you all over again. Savina understood. She drove forty minutes south to wipe his tears. Savina held Jake in her arms. She wanted to be for him what he had been for her that day that he had made her pizza but she failed. She couldn’t see straight. She still wanted him to love her. She still wanted to kiss him. She wanted them to make the love they had never made with their bodies but had made with their minds so many times, the way Savina had dreamed about over and over.

Jake didn’t want to kiss her or make love. He wanted to be sad. He sent her home. Savina’s desire was a betrayal.

Savina ached. She knew Jake would not call on her again. She had hurt him when he was already hurting. She hadn’t meant to, but she felt out of control of herself. Regret. Every thought of him brought a surge of arousal and pain. She would never be free of either. Years later Savina saw Jake on television giving an anti-federalist analysis of the impact of ineffective environmental regulations on a micro-global economy. As she marveled at the precision of his expert mind, his familiar smell wafted across her room. His nervous hands darted about and he fiddled with his wedding ring. She burst into tears. Savina knew she would love him forever. He was in her blood.

Chapter ______

Savina wanted to rush to the door to slam it before loneliness could come back inside, but loneliness didn’t try to come back in. It swung the door wide open so that Savina could see out. She saw a second silvery shadow sitting on the porch steps. It turned towards the open door and peered inside. It gazed upon her lover like a parent observing a five-year-old on a play-date. This loneliness belonged to him. Savina looked at her lover sitting on her couch examining the label on his beer bottle, taking a sip, and putting it down on the coaster that Savina had asked him to use.

     “You don’t seem like a glass and coaster kind of woman.” Savina’s lover had said to her. “I know you. I just feel like I really know you,” he repeated. This time it was the photographer, but it could have been any of them. They had known each other for a few hours, but he had already developed Savina into a fantasy of the perfect mate, or at least, the perfect affair. To him, she was a wild woman, independent, free, unattached, and easy going. She wore red satin underwear and drank golden lager straight from the bottle. Savina didn’t know if she was a coaster kind of a woman. Sometimes she drank beer out of the bottle, but lately she liked the taste of it out of a glass. Years later she wouldn’t drink beer at all. She tipped the glass she had placed on a coaster to the side and poured her chocolate-colored ale down the side of it so it wouldn’t over-foam. She looked at her lover. He already was becoming disappointed in her.

She had always been a disappointment. When Savina would come home from elementary school happy and excited to share fun things about her day, her mom would snip at her for being annoying. She sank in to silence. A few hours later her mom would criticize her for being negative and depressing. Savina tried to figure out her mother’s moods before she said or did anything. She learned how to mirror and mimic lots of feelings so that she could fit herself into any mood her mom had. She grew super-senses and became super adaptable. She practiced on everyone she came in contact with. Savina thought she had developed a special mutation, just like Charles Darwin described.

Savina used her senses to stay one step ahead of everyone. Her report cards were filled with phrases like “I don’t have to give Savina any comments. No one can be harder on her than she is on herself.” She treasured those report cards. She sat and watched as her parents opened her grades with skeptical faces. They searched for things to criticize, but when they read these lines from Savina’s teachers, her parents put the report cards down and walked away. Savina realized this was powerful. If she could become what everyone wanted before they even told her, no one would be disappointed or angry. No one would even comment. She had made her very own force field.

She got so good at it that she became unable to control it. She found herself adapting according to the needs of whomever she was with. She drank things she didn’t enjoy, bought lingerie in colors she didn’t like, nodded at conversational references she didn’t know, and laughed at things that she didn’t find funny. Once one of her patrons pointed out her ability to change her personality to match whomever was in front of her. He said it was a good business skill. He used to look down Savina’s shirt during their lunches, so Savina began to wear low cut shirts when she was going to meet him. He gave her over six-thousand dollars in money to support her art. As they walked down a sidewalk to a downtown sandwich shop called The Half and Half he told Savina that a “half and half” is also one of the things you can request from a prostitute, like a dish on a menu, something about getting both a blow job and intercourse.

Sometimes she grew uncomfortable, but it felt risky to be herself. She told one of her lovers that she didn’t feel like herself when she was with him and he grew angry. He accused her of being fake, of betrayal. Gatherings where more than one of her friends were present were the hardest. Her ability to change and adapt short-circuited due to too many incoming signals. She became awkward and painfully self conscious. She left parties exhausted, bombarded in her mind by a string of unending self-criticism. She was certain she had disappointed everyone.

Savina didn’t have the language to describe herself until she saw an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She first saw the show one day after she had tried to bike home from her summer job at college. She took a half-block detour down a one-way street and was hit by a car. Her lover at the time (the superstar boss) was having dinner with her close friend, Jake, and when they brought her, uninjured, back from the hospital to her lover’s apartment Jake apologized, but insisted that they watch the series finale, which was airing that night. Savina became hooked and watched it in syndication for the next five years.

In one episode, the crew of the Enterprise is charged with transporting precious cargo, a gift from one empire to another– a peace offering to end a lengthy war. The cargo turns out to be a woman, a rare female empathic metamorph. She was born with the ability to sense men’s emotional needs and sexual passions and to change her personality to match perfectly with theirs. She is not fully matured when the crew of the Enterprise meet her. At her full maturity she will bond permanently with one man. The personality she has become to meet that man’s needs will solidify as her personality for life.

Savina watched as the metamorph changed with each man who came near her. She became nerdy when she was around the brainy engineer, seductive when she was near manly the First Officer, and growled at the Kilngon. Finally, when she met Captain Picard, she became smart, sophisticated, and independent. He found her irresistible.

Because female empathic metamorphs were so rare they were seized as children by the government of her species so that they could be cultivated as highly valuable bargaining chips to be offered in arranged marriages for political purposes. They already had the innate ability to sense men’s emotional and sexual needs, so the government educated them in every intellectual field they could possibly need in order to be mated to any man in the galaxy, and beyond.

The metamorph’s government had selected the mate that she would bond to for life, but through a series of events, she ended up bonding to Captain Picard. She liked being the smart, sophisticated, and independent woman she morphed into when she was with him. This is the dream of every metamorph, to crystallize into a form she really liked and become bonded with the man for whom she had become that. Unfortunately for this metamorph, she cannot remain with her true mate, Picard, but instead must fulfill her duty to end generations of conflict by being married to the leader of her country’s war rival.

Oddly enough, the actress who played the metamorph in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, would later greet Savina from the big screen in a movie theatre, as Savina’s favorite childhood mutant superhero. She was also telepathic, intellectually captivating and sexually coveted by two men. Eventually, she devolved into  an evil force whose emotions become so enormous and uncontrollable that she destroyed everything in her path.

Like the metamorph, sensing emotional and sexual energy was second nature to Savina. Her rigorous schooling had provided the intellectual material she needed to engage just about anyone. She knew a little about a lot of things. She prided herself on being able to have a conversation with nearly anyone about nearly anything and to be genuinely interested and engaged. She did this best with men.

Savina realized she was an empathic metamorph.

She didn’t know how to remedy her condition. She wondered, she hoped, that one day she’d meet her own Captain Picard and morph into something that she wouldn’t mind being for the rest of her life. That seemed like the best resolution for someone like her. She wanted to bond with a man who made her like herself. Savina wanted to be married.

I collect gourmet salts. I also collect artisan cheeses. I mean, I don’t collect artisan cheeses, they would get moldy, so I eat them and log each new one I try. I use a recipe program that has a section for logging wines. I don’t have any wines in the log except the ones that the program came with. I kept those so that I can remember all the options for describing a wine and use those categories to describe cheese, and now salts. I tried to be a wine person, but wine just isn’t my thing. It bores me. Plus, I don’t know very many “wine people” who don’t seem to love it and drink it a little too much. I would be perfectly comfortable with people who could appreciate wine without getting drunk or tipsy every time they have it, but I just don’t know those people. And, with a few minor exceptions, I dislike being around people when they are intoxicated. Even some of the people I love most in the world, get snippy, snarky, or flirty when they drink and all the while think that they are either unchanged or entertaining. They aren’t. They are annoying.
 
Aside from my critiques of everyone else’s drinking habits, I’m not physically cut-out to be a drinker. I can have about one drink before I get tipsy. “damali’s second bloody Mary is always fun,” one of my theatre friends said once. I have a sensitive system. Things that affect my adrenals can wreak havoc with my body. I have to be very careful how much alcohol, caffeine and sugar I take in. Even chocolate can throw me for a loop. It’s a physical and emotional rise and fall. I get really hyper and then suffer a big crash afterwards. It’s best just for me to opt out. As a result I have a drink all of about four times a year. When people ask, I say “It’s not that I don’t drink. It’s just that I don’t drink.” 

Anyway, that’s not the point. On a recent trip to Portland. I went to my favorite gourmet salt store, The Meadow, to see what I wanted to add to my collection next. The store is amazing and the owner is brilliant, I first heard him on a cooking show I listen to on the radio sometimes. His store has a way of making you feel better just by spending time in it. One of my friends goes there just to cheer herself up. On this visit, I pointed to a glass jar of brown crystals among the white, pink, red, and black jars of salt that line the walls of the store. She poured a tiny bit into my hand I tasted it. I lit up. The salt specialist said that it started out as Himalayan pink salt but had been burned in some kind of leaf or something in India and ended up as these brown crystals. It kind of looked like dirt. What made me light up was that it also tasted like dirt. That may sound unappealing to most people, but it made my mouth water. The back of my jaw cringed in the best way, that way that only thoughts of dirt can make it shiver. It was amazing. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time. I wondered if I should buy it since it was reminiscent of a questionable eating pattern I had several years earlier, but I couldn’t resist. I bought it and brought it home. It’s delicious.

I have an eating disorder called Pica. It means that I like to eat things that are not meant to be food. It’s one of those things that I’ve never had officially diagnosed, but it’s pretty obvious. You only need to see a person eat sand, dirt, or potting soil once or twice to figure they’ve got it. As a kid I ate sand in handfuls, right out of the sandbox. It was one of those things along with teaching my best friend the f-word, that my parents got a call about when I was in kindergarten. I didn’t know the f-word was bad and I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to eat sand. I loved the taste, the texture, and how it little bits of it stayed in my mouth and surprised me with unexpected crunches for hours after I ate it. I still like the taste of sand. I love the taste of ocean brine and that impossible crunch of something that my mouth can’t actually chew. I had a jar of sand I had gathered from some beach and kept to use in my art. It took me about a year, but I ate half of it. I also love the taste of soil. I can be caught licking my fingers after digging in my garden. For a long time I’d pick out those little white bits of silica and pumice that come in potting soil and crunch on those. Those were my favorite. After a while I realized this was not only potentially unhealthy, but seemingly abnormal. I had a hard time being in a room with a potted plant without trying to figure out when I could sneak a pinch of a little white minerals from its soil and get that satisfying metallic crunch that made the back of my jaw water.

One day I was in therapy with one of my favorite therapists. Yes, I’ve had enough therapists to call one or two my favorites. Her name was Irinie, she was a Swiss-German woman with a gorgeous thick accent, who hated Europe, drove a sports car and sat on the floor among a cadre of pillows. She started every session by sing-songingly asking me “Vould you like a tea?” I adored her. She had a graceful way of getting straight to the point. I found her style efficient and refreshing. She didn’t insult my intelligence by asking me “how does that make you feel?” She could see how things made me feel and get on to helping me cope with them.

I started seeing her after I had a self-proclaimed nervous breakdown. I had been in a creative collaboration and emotional entanglement with a friend with for four years. Our confusing relationship drove me to the edge of my mind, and then beyond. I broke. He told me I might want to get some counseling. I called Irinie. In one of our sessions I explained how he used to break up with his girlfriend every so often and when he did, or even when they were just having a rough patch, he would get closer to me. He’d call me to go out. He’d open up and share personal things with me. He’d touch me more. He’d say things that suggested that we would make a perfect couple. Then he’d get back together with his girlfriend, become private and withdrawn, stop touching me, and deny he ever said those things. He tried to convince me that I was making all of it up. I felt crazy. It hurt. It hurt insanely bad all the time. Before I could finish telling Irinie about this situation her adorable Swiss-German accent interrupted me.
     “That’s fucked up,” she said. I stopped explaining. We didn’t talk about him much more after that. Anytime I found myself drawn back into his spell, I heard Irinie’s voice. She was right. This was fucked up.

One holiday season my I had asked my mom for some kitchen stuff. I needed a new small non-stick frying pan and a spatula. Mom also included a flower-printed towel and some wooden spoons. On the packaging for the wooden spoons she had taken a magic marker and written, “Mommy’s Favorite.” Mom used to spank us with wooden spoons. Sometimes she hit us so hard that they would break. After our spankings, she’d put the wooden spoon back into the kitchen drawer and we’d use it for mixing orange juice from concentrate, or for frying ground beef to mixed with spaghetti sauce and pasta shaped like shells. This seemed perfectly normal. Sometimes my sisters and I joked about it, especially when the only clean wooden spoon we could find was the broken one. The insanity of stirring a pitcher of orange juice with a wooden spoon that my mother had broken in half by hitting me with it didn’t sink in until I was an adult. By the time I received the “Mommy’s Favorite” package of wooden spoons from my mom, I knew this was, to use Irinie’s words, “fucked up.”

I took the spoons in the package to her. Again before I finished my story, Irinie interrupted, this time by snatching the spoons from my hands and hiding them behind her back. I stopped talking. My mouth hung open, mid-sentence.
     “You don’t need to see these anymore,” Irinie said.
     “What are you going to do with them?” I asked, half-wanting to keep the spoons. I kind of enjoyed looking at them. Evidence of how crazy and cruel my mother could be was oddly comforting to me.
     “I will dispose of them. You don’t have to think about them anymore.”  Irinie smiled defiantly. She straightened her posture as if to tell the spoons behind her back that she was an immovable force.

A month or so later, I found the courage to share my desire to eat dirt with Irinie. She found it fascinating. Her voice perked up as she asked me to describe why. I told her that dirt is earthy, grounding, and “minerally.” She became enwrapped. She asked me to lie on the floor. I did. She ran around the room finding blankets to pile on top of me to simulate my being under the heavy, sinking earth. That was fantastic. She told me to close my eyes and tell her more about the dirt. I answered. Dirt felt rich. I loved how it smelled. It felt old and new at the same time, ancient and fresh. I loved rubbing it between my fingers. It felt clean. I wanted to bathe in it. I wish I could absorb it, I wanted to get closer and closer to the dirt, but couldn’t get close enough. I wanted to eat it. I stopped talking when I sounded like Jeffrey Dahmer explaining why he began killing and eating his lovers.

Irinie plopped backwards onto the floor from where she had been attentively hunched over me watching. I opened my eyes and looked at her. She looked back at me and nodded. “Oh,” She breathed out. “You are intellectually starved.”

Chapter _______

Savina sat on her bed late at night in a quiet house filling a plastic photo album. It was taller than it was wide and fit three photos on each page. They slid into clear slots from the center of the album stacking one on top of another like vertical comic book panels. For the very first page she defiantly wrote with black marker on three strips from her favorite gold and silver notepad and slipped them into the slots to make a title page for the book. It read, “My Friends– My Real Family.”

She had sat on her bed late at night alone with another crafty project two years earlier, hand sewing a dress for her eighth grade graduation. Her parents were engulfed in the drama being created by one of her two older teenage sisters and seemed to forget that they had a third daughter in need of support, attention, and a graduation dress. Savina, frustrated, also saw this as an opportunity. She always found ways to show what she could do to the outside world. At home her creativity felt more like an inconvenience than talent. She took the bus to her favorite second-hand clothing consignment shop in the funky shopping district a few miles from her school. She picked out a light beige 1960’s vintage eyelet dress trimmed in thick crocheted antique lace. She changed it from a short sleeved dress to a sundress by cutting off the sleeves and using the eyelet trim to make shoulder straps. She also had to make some adjustments so that it would fit her small breasts. She was having trouble getting the chest darts right and had sewn them over and over again, unable to fit it to tightly to her small frame. The left shoulder strap consistently fell down, and the newly formed underarms of the dress were uneven. One was shaped like a U as it should be, and the other appeared like a crooked patchwork V. Still, she loved that dress with every bone in her body. She was proud of it.

She was also frightened by it.

She was afraid her parents would be angry with her for sewing her dress herself. They were always angry about something, and often that something was unpredictable. It was best to plan for all the possibilities than to be blindsided without a prepared defense. Savina went over the options. They could yell at her for taking the bus to Georgetown without their permission, or for wearing second-hand clothing which might have reflected poorly on her mother’s reputation, (“You can’t wear that. People know me there!” was something Savina heard frequently). Worse, they could simply tell her that her make-shift sewing job was feeble, un-wearable, and that the dress belonged in the trash. Savina figured they would find some reason to disapprove. They always did. This time, Savina knew that when they got angry it was really because her desperately conceived and poorly sewn dress would serve as public evidence of the fact that their daughter was using her fourteen-year-old skills to play her own parent in a failed, highly visible attempt to appear normal in comparison to the other kids in her eighth grade class, putting the emptiness she felt at home on display for her entire school to see.

This was exactly why she was sewing it.

Two years later, sitting in the same place where she had sewn that dress in secret, late at night, Savina quietly compiled photos of her friends into neat categories stacking the pictures three-high. She placed any picture that had herself in it in the middle slot and flanked it with photos she had of the people she liked from her school. With each page, the emptiness that she was trying to fill seemed to grow. She had designed this project so that she could feel as if she belonged somewhere, as if she was connected to something greater. She wanted to look at these photos and know that somewhere in the world people loved her and cared about what happened to her. It wasn’t working.

With each photo Savina slid into the album, a voice next to her answered her yearning to belong with a guarantee that she did not. This was not the voice of her mother who would repeatedly tell her over the course of her lifetime “Those people don’t really love you.” This sour companion had its own voice. As she looked at the photos Savina felt optional, like an add-on to the lives of people in each tableau. She was a condiment, not a main course, a non-essential. She had felt loneliness by her side when she was sewing her dress, but she was surprised that it came back now with such confidence. Tonight loneliness would move in to Savina’s room and stay.

Eventually the people in Savina’s photo album drifted away. Over the years they were replaced and re-replaced by other people who also drifted away. As people came and went loneliness became the most familiar relationship in Savina’s life, her most consistent friend. She realized that loneliness knew more about her than any living, breathing person.

One of the friends who had come and gone once told her that she believed that every person has one quality that they have to deal with their entire life. Her friend, whose brother had died from cancer as a teenager, had decided that it was her fate to live with loss. She thought that was her life’s theme. Savina had lost someone she loved deeply to cancer when she was seventeen. When her mother ridiculed Savina at the memorial, then punished her for being too emotional, she didn’t feel a sense of loss. She felt alone. She always felt alone. She wanted to be like the rest of the world. She wanted to be like normal people. She didn’t know why everyone else could go to the funeral but she had to go home.

The rest of the world seemed to eat dinner together every night only to slide a cheerful note under Savina’s door that they had left her some were delicious leftovers in the fridge. When she would ask the world why she hadn’t been invited to dinner, she was told, “we figured you already had plans,” and “we didn’t think you’d be interested in eating with us.” People often mistook her independence for sovereignty. 

Some nights when she didn’t know whom to call, Savina would play an album on the record player she had bought when she was a sophomore in college. She was a dorm counselor and her pay for the semester hadn’t been enough to make a dent in her expenses, but it was just the right amount to buy herself something frivolous. One of the students in her dorm told her later that she wasn’t a very good counselor. He said she was always depressed and wanted to stay in her room alone. She’d put a sign on her door saying she was out but he knew that most of the time she was in there.

Her room was in the lower level of a four story dorm. It was between the rooms numbers that started with a zero and those that started with a one. The ones that started with zero were below ground level. The students called that the “O-zone.” The first above ground floor started with rooms at 110. Savina’s room number was 103. It was mostly but not completely below street level. The view outside her iron-barred window was two-thirds concrete slab, topped by sidewalk and the outside world. Savina’s window framed a stream of passing shoes and socks of the people walking by. She could see enough to know that people were there, but not enough to know who they were. When Savina lied in her bed by the window, it felt as if the people were walking on top of her. Once in a while, when her light was on, a familiar face would kneel down and peer into Savina’s window to see if she was home and say hello on their way to class or dinner.

She went to meals by herself. She went to movies by herself. She loved to go to movies by herself. She just hated leaving them. Loneliness would show up just as the credits started to roll and the lights came up revealing couples and friends chatting away about the storyline, music, and actors. Savina ducked her head and strode up the dim isles as quickly as possible. Loneliness followed close behind. She nodded meekly at the door attendants as she dumped her bag of popcorn kernel remnants into the trash and exited out the side door that opened directly onto the parking lot.

Savina sat, soaking in her bathtub in her apartment in a rainy city looking out a new window at the white sky, listening to a song she listened to a lot:

I’m waiting and there’s still no one to meet my train
I’m waiting and there’s no one but myself to blame.
I’ve got a river of kin, a footbridge of neighbors,
The rest of my little world is full-fledged strangers.

She thought of all the times she flew out of town for work. By the time she was in her thirties that was about twice a month. Savina never felt comfortable asking anyone to drive her to the airport. One time she did, she nearly missed her plane. Lately she drove herself. She parked at the nearby rental car lot where the shuttle drivers gave her kind yet generic greetings before they toted her to her departure gate. This was the same reason she always made sure her roadside auto assistance was paid. If she got a flat tire, Savina wasn’t sure who to call. She spent nights staring at the numbers in her cell phone but not calling anyone.

Loneliness was an imaginary friend who could play with her mind but couldn’t touch her. No one touched her. Not in a way she wanted. Not in nice ways. No one cradled her in their arms, gently stroked her hair, or kissed her without it being an overture for sex. No one had held her hand in years. Savina missed affection. Strangers touched her every day, in a barrage of mauling that she didn’t request and tried not to permit. They talked about her skin and  grabbed her long black hair to tell her how strange it was. For a period of time people on busses and on the street were obsessed a shiny hard backpack Savina had that looked like a wearable jet propulsion device. Every day someone touched that backpack. They knocked on it, stroked it, pointed it out to their friends. They asked her questions about it without asking her name. She stopped using it. She sold it on eBay. Sometimes she wondered how she could do the same with her skin and her hair.

She told herself that these moments were trite, just fleeting bits of her whole, full life. But after a while, the moments repeated so frequently that her days seemed to be more filled with loneliness than with life. She stopped looking at the numbers in her cell phone. She wondered if the people who knew her realized that she wanted them to call. They didn’t. They were at the dinner table. She’d hear about the leftovers later. Savina put on a record.

Every few years someone swept into her life like a dashing lover from a romantic movie. They cut into Savina’s dance with loneliness, spun her around the room, and questioned the time she wasted dancing with someone so unworthy of her. The first was the new superstar boss at her college job who walked the streets of the city with Savina until they had coffee at every shop within a mile radius. They made love that night on the light-blue carpeted floor, and in the hallway, and in the kitchen, of their office. Another was an award-winning photographer who came to her house to capture her for the local newspaper. Within an hour he had wrapped her in his arms in a passionate kiss. A third was a world-class musician whom she met after a concert of her favorite band. She leaned into his ear to ask him something. He held her hand and would not let it go.

Savina went to the kitchen to get her lover a beer. As she sat down opposite the new face and hands messing with the teal pillows on her red couch, loneliness used its key to open Savina’s front door just enough for a breeze to pass through the room. As Savina turned to see where the cold was coming from, loneliness stuck it’s head in and said, “He’s married. I’ll be waiting outside.”

I was in Portland to do a presentation for the city employees. I stayed a few extra days to visit a handful of friends I visit when I have, or rather, when I choose to create, the luxury of extra time.

Always on the list is my friend Hal. He’s an architect. We met when I was a self-taught artist and budding set designer who couldn’t sketch an empty room if I tried. This was my deep dark secret, and I sought to remedy it by writing a grant for drawing lessons. I gave half the grant money to an amazing teacher for whom I had worked as a figure model years earlier. He had a teaching method that was known for being unorthodox but extremely effective and fun. He found a way to praise every single drawing we did. He got extra excited when people’s renditions of beautiful figure models turned out as unrecognizable scribbles, and really lit up when one student scrawled so hard on the page,  he tore right through it. Even with the free-for-all style of the class, drawing made me incredibly nervous. I actually drank a swig of whiskey from the bottle I kept in my truck (this was during my theatre days) just to walk in the door one day. Still, terrified or not, I enjoyed every moment. I finished levels one and two of his classes and took an anatomy drawing with another instructor for whom I had also modeled.

The figure drawing instructor recommended Hal to teach me structural drawing which I could apply directly to set design. These would be one-on-one lessons. That was overwhelming. In class with the other scribblers, loud music and naked models, I was distracted from at least some of my fear, but with Hal, my terror was amplified. Not only could he sense my engulfing trepidation but he pointed right at it. He assured me that I was capable of overcoming it. I wasn’t. I paid Hal for the lessons and never completed even the first assignment he gave me. Instead we became the best of friends. When it was time to leave my theatre company, I asked Hal to take my place as the set designer. He’s brilliant. He says I still have a credit with him whenever I want to tackle my fear and learn to draw.

Hal and I headed to Masu, a Japanese food and Sushi place where we had a delightful time the last time I was in town and we had dinner together. We hoped to repeat the peaceful, engaged evening we had with our ultra-adorable server who actually knew me. She had taken one day of the class I taught during my MFA program, but dropped out of school soon after. She knew everything about sushi and sake and we loved her. We both hoped we would see her again, especially Hal, who has a thing for younger women.

We walked into what we thought would be a quiet atmosphere only to find that it was Friday night and packed with Portland foodies. The town has grown into a place where people spend the bulk of their time and money eating and drinking. I forget this. When I lived in Portland this wasn’t as big of an issue. Now friends and I have often found ourselves unable to get a table at restaurants if we don’t plan in advance. Hal and I hadn’t. The owner, whom we recognized from our last visit greeted us as we entered with a regretful look that we hadn’t made a reservation. He said we could sit at the sushi bar or in the red chairs. We peered over his shoulder to find a stout triangle shaped table with four ergonomic and artsy red chairs lounging around its perimeter. This looked better than a regular table so I said, “That’s perfect.”

Hal and I took our seats on one side of the table in two of the funky red chairs, I plopped my coat and purse on the third and Hal followed. We both had to retract the relinquishing of our outerwear to retrieve our respective eyeglasses. Once we could see, we repositioned our coats and my purse back on the third chair and picked up our menus. As we took cursory glances at the paper before us while I was trying to catch Hal upon the last two months of my life, a wind blew by us as a creature clad in black pants and a black button-down shirt landed in the fourth red chair.

     “Hi, I’m Casey. I’ll be your server this evening.”

     “Okay.” We said, staring at the spectacle who seem to be performing yet awkward, and way too familiar with us. Hal wanted sake. He always wants sake, or whiskey. I agreed. Hal is one of the few people I drink with. He might be the only person I drink with anymore. That’s because he’s one of the few people in the world who I don’t mind when he’s drunk, he and my friend Heather, who is so serious most of the time that I actually am happy when she’s drunk. As a result, she generally sends me a text when she is tipsy which is her way of making sure someone is paying attention and can make sure she doesn’t develop a drinking problem. It seems to have worked for her so far.

Hal inquired about a specific kind of sake he had heard about, only to find out that it costs $140 dollars a bottle and is not sold by the glass. Casey pointed him to another sake which he ordered although it was clear that Hal was disappointed. I suspected that he wished he was wealthy enough to order the expensive stuff. Hal lives pretty simply and at is at no risk of becoming a greedy person, but he’s almost sixty and I can see his wishing, as I’ve seen other white male friends headed toward sixty wishing, that he could afford the most expensive sake or whiskey whenever he wanted it. He even says it that way, “I’m one of those older whiskey-drinking white guys now.” After working hard, raising a family, and putting himself last for a long time, I see no problem with this. He deserves to indulge. If he had ordered the $140 bottle of sake, I would have been excited for him.

I’m not sure if it was because I wanted warm sake or because I ordered my water with no ice, but at some point I must have mentioned that I hate being cold. I do. I have a low body temperature. Most people hover at 98.6 degrees, but I am a cool 96.8. Mostly that means that I love sitting in the sun and keep my apartment warmer than most. If I had one of those heated bricks that the snake in my fourth grade science class had, I’d curl up on it, no question. It’s only really a problem when I go to the doctor sweating and hazy only to have a medical assistant who isn’t even looking at me, cheer “no fever, that’s good!”  I have explain her that for me, 98.6 degrees is a fever. They never believe me. I had told this to Hal only minutes earlier and he had responded by making at least three jokes in that time about it. One of his jokes must have been made in Casey’s presence because when he brought over the sake and our water he said, “Okay lizard lady, here you go.” He put down the water, bottle of sake, and clear, cylindrical glasses.

     “Woah. Hey. Where are the boxes?” I said, referring to the squat red and black lacquered square boxes from which sake is traditionally drank. Our lovely waitress from before had taught us that those boxes are called, Masu, although I do remember her educating us that they are usually made of plain, light colored wood. She pointed out the wall décor of light wood colored boxes behind the sushi bar. Masu was the name of the restaurant, so I had been pretty confident that they would arrive with our drink. When they didn’t, I beefed, “The whole point is drinking this stuff out of the boxes. Isn’t it?” I hadn’t intended to be so saucy, but Casey started it, and Hal always brings out the sauce in me. He finds it entertaining. Casey swiped up the glasses without a word and floated away.

     “Did he just call me ‘lizard lady?’ Did you hear that?”

The sake was the last thing we actually ordered ourselves. Besides my indicating that I love scallops, and Hal’s inquiring about the fresh oysters, it seemed like Casey ordered our whole meal. I guess that was his prerogative after he came back to our table three times only to find that we were too engrossed in conversation to have looked at the menu. He didn’t have patience for that.

As Casey leaned over to place our sushi, I spied a mottled dark blue-grey circle on the back of his neck. I love tattoos on the back of the necks of men and before I could help myself my hand was on his collar.

     “I’m going to touch you now.” At least I remembered to give him fair warning.

     “Sure, touch me.” Casey replied as he pointed to fish, oysters, and scallops, and described our array of food. I paid no attention. I’d get the cliff notes from Hal later. I pulled on Casey’s black shirt collar to reveal the top half of what looked like a dark moon and a Samurai sword.

     “What is it?” I asked.

     “It’s this Japanese demon thing.” I wasn’t sure if Casey’s tone hinted that he wanted me to ask more or that he wanted me to bugger off. It sounded like he was telling me just enough to satisfy my curiosity, but not enough to accidentally put a curse on me.

     “Oh, really, why? What is that about? What do you do in the world?” I gambled that he wanted me to ask more. Clearly Casey was cut out to be something other than a waiter. I thought that maybe he was a martial arts instructor, or perhaps obviously, a Samurai.

     “Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter.” Casey avoided the question. I stared at him. He hedged, changed the subject, and found a reason to leave.

Hal and I caught up on the past two months, devoured our sushi and ordered a fish that we ate with our hands. We finished our sake (in the boxes) and I got a darn effective lecture/pep-talk from Hal about confronting my fears about being influenced by other writers’ voices. We finished our Casey-selected meal and thanked him for it as he collected our plastic cards for payment. He returned with the receipts for us to sign and greeted us by the first names he read on the cards.

     “So, damali, Harold, what do each of you do, you know, for a living?”

     “No. No. No. No, no, no.” I had to tell myself to stop saying no. “You don’t get to ask us what we do if you aren’t going to tell us what you do.” That wasn’t fair. Hal laughed and stared at Casey, backing me up.

     “You don’t want to know.” Part of Casey’s confident attitude seemed to shrink a little. That bugged me. What is going on with this guy?

     “Yes. Yes I do.”
     “No, really.”
     “Yes. Really.”

     “I’m on this…it’s a…spiritual path. It’s complicated. I can’t really tell you about it.” Again Casey was either protecting himself, or us, or just being annoyingly evasive. I love talking about spiritual paths, and perked up but Casey made it clear that he wasn’t going to say any more.

Hal broke the tension of my demanding and unsatisfied stare at the hedging Casey. “I’m an architect and a set designer.” Hal’s been building his web site and I think he’s having fun rattling off his credentials-as-identity. That happens when you spend months summing yourself up to be click-friendly. Casey used that as a way to conclude up our evening and bid us a good night. It was time for dessert anyway.

Walking down the street licking balsamic vinegar and cocoa nibs ice cream from the trendy ice cream shop in the ghetto-turned-hipstser gentrified neighborhood in which I used to live, I stopped in my tracks.

     “Hal, I think that guy was a demon. That’s why he didn’t want to tell us what he does. He’s a demon. Do you realize we were served our food by a demon?”

     “I don’t know if he was a demon…” Hal replied skeptical that Casey had that kind of potential, “…but he sure was a diva.”

     “He’s a diva demon!” We exclaimed in tandem.

     “Hah! So that means he wants to be the one to steal all the souls, huh?” I said, pondering the nature of a diva demon.

     “No.” Hal responded smartly as if he had experience with this kind of thing. “He wants you to steal all the souls. He just wants to get credit for it.”

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Note: for my Portland readers, you can go to Masu, it does exist. The food is great. All other names have been changed, just in case Casey really is a demon. One never knows these days.

I was standing with my friend Karrin at the Cheese Bar in Portland. It’s a grand little place that has a selection of the worlds best cheeses and a fun array of dishes featuring cheese in all its glory. We put our order in for a strata and fondue and were standing at the back of the restaurant in a cozy area between our table and a shelving unit full of accoutrements. There were chutneys, olives, crackers, and tiny pieces of bread, all dressed up to look gourmet enough to sit below, next to, or on top of a piece of fancy cheese.

Above the rows of tiny toasted bread, there was a section of things encased in tins. Among the silver and brass colored caskets, I spied a tin of smoked oysters, and pointed to it. We had just seen a chef on a cooking show be eliminated the night before due to his use of canned oysters. Karrin commented that “See, canned oysters can be classy.” I confessed that I go through tins of smoked oysters to the tune of two or three a week. I am embarrassed by this. Canned oysters look like little oily chunks of feces and are almost as smelly. I assume that once I am in a relationship, I’m going to have to either give them up or eat them in stealth outside the house, which would be hard to hide without a thorough teeth brushing and possibly a shower directly after. Instead, I hope that whomever I do partner with can accept me as I am, oysters and all.

I justified my smelly canned habit to Karrin, as I will to my future partner, by noting that oysters have a lot of protein and are a great source of iron which is good for me because I am anemic more often than not. As I spewed off my rehearsed oyster speech, Karrin simultaneously told me the same thing. Apparently she already knew the justifications for eating smelly canned food. Next to the oysters I noticed a similar tin of octopus. Thinking of it now, it seems quite  a small tin to contain octopus, I wonder if it was baby octopus or maybe just a tentacle or two. Karrin grimaced. That struck me as odd as I thought that I had actually consumed octopus with her in the past, although I didn’t enjoy it at all. As I replayed the moment in my head of tasting my first and only rubbery bite that I am not sure I even swallowed, I envisioned the two smiling, octopus-chewing faces who were with me that day, neither of them were Karrin’s. I began to apologize for my mistaking her for an octopus lover when she corrected me.
     “No,” she said, “I do like it, but I recently found out that they are extremely intelligent creatures.” Karrin explained the source of the tortured look she had given me as I handed her the octopus tin.
     We sat down at our table and awaited our lunch. I replied “Well, if we all started eating our food based on its intelligence level, pigs would be off the table. And quite honestly, let’s just be clear, if that were our policy, we’d really have to become cannibals.”