Holly Ranger 69
Holly meets me in the yard and it feels strange. Worse yet, it feels sad. We didn’t want what we’d let in, not anymore.
Holly,
What kind of winter is this?
Holly bleaches her eyebrows after work but before the half-grand, she lies about her flu shot and leans on one arm while he penetrates the rear, he sends her home to me half-dressed and with no tip. There’s never really a tip. The half-grand itself takes care of engrained service blues and devastation. Money’s always cold.
Dear Holly,
This morning, I ate seven clementines to distract a dry mouth and threw up all over the headrest in Jane’s car. Don’t think about laughing. If I do, I throw up. I nearly missed her honking up the block, twenty minutes, she said. There was a stranger in the car. All the vomit was pulp, I’d packed an orange jacket but wore your black one. It’s tossing in the machine, now. I never meant for the jacket to become my ransom. I felt angry for a while, then feigned nostalgia, then leant it to people you wouldn’t want wearing it, then I lost it and found it again, packed it up and moved it from house to house to house. It’s never felt mine. It’s my ghost of you, hooked in closets. It’s seen me naked. It’s touched me naked. It’s touched me naked almost as much as you, by now, and remains just as much a stranger as you, by now. The machine’s working itself up. I recoil.
Hi Holly,
Have you heard anything about Matteo and Jane? I know more than I should. It’s not much, Holly, but enough to drag me up to write. He’s moved on up, to Astoria I think, and Jane’s things are all in heaps and boxes at the old place. She was working remotely a while, out of state, I thought they’d just been operating a business-casual year in their relationship. Hadn’t you thought so, too? I don’t know. I get sick over stories like these. The empathy’s half there, but it’s always a bit too narrowly centered for me to believe. I’ve learned to drive while crying. It materializes in the windshield condensation, relentless, piteous despair over the freeway, nauseating grief, masterful awareness. I should start writing in pencil.
Dear Holly,
It’s been a while. You should’ve tried harder. I guess it ended up sewing and dressing itself. The burgers always, unfortunately, taste like beef. It’s nothing like McDonalds.
Holly,
I can’t stop shaking my head. All the same thoughts and ideas are still there. It’s burning like an ear infection. I was far too young to understand what you remember, I was far too ignorant, remember? I hadn’t many reasons, then, to hold out for anyone or anything in particular, but submit to the heavier hand and swallow underwater with crouched knees. Before patting your own back but after admitting to the cheating you took a flash photo of me against the bedroom wall. You pulled back and looked at it a moment and I hadn’t a thing to say, not one, because despite my devastation, Holly, I lapped at the publicity, deracination, as you tilted your head back up saying, So that I remember to never bring your face back to this again. We stoop-smoked in that night’s sleet with our hoods bunched to cheeks and fucked in the bathroom and I couldn’t remember thinking a single thing other than, These tiles are black and also white.
[Holly’s Birthday, Mexico City, Mexico]
In the morning there’s roosters. I don’t mind them much. Somehow in the night my head and pillow ended up over her face and I woke in laughter. We eat peppered plantains off the burner with slathers of yogurt and brush our teeth into each other’s hair. Every time we try and shower together we end up arguing so we go one by one, and despite my request not to she shuts the door as I braise in the airtight and windowless room.
We pass Matteo’s family roadside abeyance and hear only radio ads, and see only orange kittens. At the base of the home extension, his mother’s chew of pith, a wiry woman stands in the doorframe with her back turned to us and I watch a slew of young, greyish goats bleat with bleary eyes and make their way toward the entrance, rapidly smacking at their lips in anticipation, and, to my bewilderment the woman steps aside, herding the goats into the house, tapping each one on the head as they entered.
We stall there on the incline, watching the shut door and squinting to the sun until the warmth on my thighs turns deeper in color, watching until the folds of my skin sink rivers of wear, age, bucolic luxuriation. The mother’ll reemerge. Around happy hour, she’ll stand at her husband’s roadside entrance with tamarind and ginger, when the cats start rolling back through the yard to escape the humidity and the goats bleat into each other’s necks. They’ll dance together for a few minutes but stop to sit again because he’s tired and she hasn’t the patience to drag him at the heels. I worry that night, when dancing alone, a ghost’ll watch me. I think I’ve got the upper hand, that I can’t be embarrassed if I can’t hear laughter, but I’ll stop again and wait for the sunrise to light my legs just in case my hearing decides to peak.
Dear Holly,
I wish you’d held out a tick longer, a tick and a lick, I want you back in bed. I taste you when I lick foreign rolling papers. Matteo’s trying something with me. He knows. I didn’t say a thing. Jane may’ve. He watches in sobriety as his father and I stir the tamarind through tequila, and kicks my ankle under the table as I accept his (coquettish) moonshine offering. I hadn’t tried it before and when he asks how I like it I say, Todo mi cuerpo está en llamas, and Matteo watches him laugh ’til purple without understanding a lick of the lead. Following his fourth narrow shot, Matteo’s father touched my thigh, shaking his head until I did the same. It’s brutal, he said, Estar sin palabras para alguien con las orejas tan grandes.
Once she’s rinsed clean, we drive Oeste with my hands up and over, wondering this and that about the mountain formations, the calcium levels, the ghosts, and especially why I am doing what I am, and how hard it’d be to lose someone like her or this can of beer, and in this skew we’re passing a set of pastel castles in dirt and dry greenery and a merry-go-round and it’s all empty and too big to be overgrown so I cry and we stare at it and we pretend I’m not feeling much anything at all.