during the seventies, a period when American men began to favor the double-knit fashion of synthetic fabrics such as “leisure suits.” I served Michelob beer and martinis to some of them, overheard their conspiracies. Artaud had been dead for 27 years. I wept.
She confessed
her reason for no longer wearing pantyhose; she felt like a four-legged woman. There’s a book of poems with that title. One night Mickey Mantle leaned out from a payphone booth off the Neil House lobby and ordered a bourbon on the rocks. The bars I favored were underground…it WAS the ’70s after all. The following day at the bookstore where I worked they gave me a two-week notice of dismissal. A sunny April morning. I walked out and drove to Yellow Springs while Patty Hearst remained captive.
I admit
to barely listening; instead, I watched her rattle in rapid staccato. Her habit, almost a tic, was to close, then open her eyes when she spoke, repeatedly. When you were a child did your doll have a face of such porcelain makeup? New comic books were a dime with fresh stories monthly. Not long after, the wedding china chipped, poison ivy established residency within cracks of the asphalt driveway. Conversations salvoed between them like the never-ending neighborhood leaf blowers. Whispers went extinct.
I stared
at her pink shimmer as the lids blinked, almost purple, the plums’ dusty reflections pulsating from the booth in the lounge. Semiprecious irises. Magnetic eyes that matched the mauve gauze of her pullover in my gaze. Women earned as little as 29 cents-per-hour assembling clothing in Pakistani mills for export.
She nursed
her daughter until the child commenced teething, then worked as a breastfeeding counselor at the health department. Researchers note that dogs, cats and horses also display the patellar reflex. A four-legged woman, perhaps.
