fear and the angels – part one – departure (6)

by thepoetblue

Posted to Action Poetry on 2001-06-22 10:33:00

Kirsten had spent endless hours in dance practice as long as she could remember and it fascinated E. Kirsten was dancing when she took her first steps and her parents often bragged that she started doing pirouettes before she started to walk. She loved to practice in the workout room alone, her isolated body framed by the infinity of the endless reflections created by the floor to ceiling mirrors on every wall and the image of her body conjoined with the stretching bar which found its way around the borders of the room. The bar seemed to be always floating there, holding her aloft, a simple and perfect measure of perpendicularity, a solitary yardstick for the discovery of right angles and all the other precise degrees of her current ballet routine. She loved every form of dancing and took all the classes – ballet, modern, jazz, ballroom, even salsa and disco. Anything and everything. She would often be taking two or three dance classes at once which allowed her to have a different routine to practice when she got bored with the ballet routine she was trying to perfect. It would really bother her blue haired ballet teacher, an aging woman named Karen who had never gotten to be a perfect bellerina, had never gotten to dance in Moscow, Paris, and Buenos Aeries and saw in Kirsten a future which Karen had been denied. She wanted Kirsten to have no distractions from the ballet. Karen pushed Kirsten hard from a young age, making the girl stay late and practice for hours on end, sometimes with tears in her eyes because Kirsten knew her family was home, huddled happily around the dinner table without her. Legs spread wide, holding one up for what seemed like an eternity and then moving onto some flying leaps, eight year-old Kirsten would pretend the tears were unreal, that she was imagining them and if that wasnÂ’t working, she would imagine her family as unreal, just a song or a storybook about a bunch of people eating dinner without their daughter.
At first, her mother had resisted the long hours and had arguments with Karen about whether or not she wanted Kirsten devoting so much of her time to dance. But soon, it became easy, and, besides, KirstenÂ’s father was always at the office late, so Kirsten might as well not be home to see her mother getting so upset. And it upset Kirsten; her mother knew this, that three or four nights a week they woud sit down to dinner without Dad, without his stiff smile and without the promise of laughing at the little bits of food that tended to get caught in his goofy, overblown, self-important black mustache. But now, KirstenÂ’s youthful imagination took over. She never knew for a fact whether or not her father was there for dinner. He was, however, almost always home by eight when she got home. Her mother, tired and usually a bit annoyed, would heat up a plate in the microwave and place it in front of Kirsten with as much gleeless routine as she could muster. Mother would ask her daughter how things went at the studio that day. Gazing at the wall as if she could see through it, Kirsten would already be trying to guess that her father was in for the evening. There was a permanent background din in the evening household composed of primetime sitcom laughtracks or newsmagazine voices. The tube always blared from the other room and Kirsten would strain to hear, searching for the sound of some giggles or snoring under the mad talk of the TV. Inevitably, in those brief instants between show and commercial, as the broadcasters were turning the volume up a notch all the better for selling the wares of their sponsers, she would hear the dying chuckle or the rising and falling nasal whine of her fatherÂ’s sleep. She would know her father was home, hibernating in front of the tube, and whether he had just arrived there or been there for two hours after having had a rare dinner home with the family, she imagined that he had been there all along. Kirsten allowed herself to imagine that things were right between her father and her mother. And every night, she would share one genuine moment of affection with her mother. Having seen that her daughter had noticed her husbandÂ’s presence in the house, that her daughter could relax, that everything was alright, KirstenÂ’s mother would give Kirsten a parental nod and a half-smile. Things were together, safe and secure, for one more evening. That tension, those unexplainable marital difficulties that were so much more affecting to Kirsten because they lacked explanation or definition, was not going to rip things apart tonight.
Unlike her mother, Kirsten couldnÂ’t imagine that her father was sleeping with the latest pretty young hire in the office. She didnÂ’t imagine that he was fucking one of the sixteen year-old girls from the driving class he taught on Saturday mornings to make extra money. She didnÂ’t fear that he was secretly a drunk, a drug addict, or a gambler, spending their savings in dens of iniquity every evening and pretending to be an average, hard-working joe. She didnÂ’t imagine any of the things her mother imagined. Kirsten wouldnÂ’t allow it. The elaborate system she had worked up by staying late and devoting herself to dance, creating a lie within her mind that she never recognized as an untruth, was designed to defeat suspicions and unhappiness. It was engineered and purposeful, spontaneous and organic. It was a contract the protected her, a child, from having to experience the pain of the adult world. The contract remained unbroken for many years.
One day, though, Kirsten came home to find her mother weeping, a quivering, leaking pile of hair and contorted facial gestures atop arms folded and resting on the kitchen table. The water was running in the kitchen sink, flowing over pans with burnt meat in them that seemed like it may have been the beginings of a chicken dinner. Kirsten, now fourteen, was struck by the soaking blackened fowl because her mother so seldom fried anything. Perhaps her mother was expecting something special of KirstenÂ’s father, perhaps she was certain her husband would be home for dinner and wanted to make a rare, special treat. Kirsten looked at the confused faces of her little sister and little brother, piled on top of one another, peering through the doorway from the other room. Their faces suggested that there had indeed been a surprise from Dad. Kirsten looked to the heap that was her mother, tears running along her hair, cascading over her arms onto the table, dirty blonde strands like green vines protecting a brick wall from a rain storm. KirstenÂ’s father was gone.
The hours and hours in the dance studio took on a different tone. They no longer served the same unspoken intent. Kirsten didnÂ’t even know why, but she wasnÂ’t so interested anymore. The dance had ended. Karen shook her head. She stopped smiling. She went from enthusiastic to condemning. She wrote letters to friends of hers, complaining how her young and talented prodigy seemed to have given up. When Kirsten was fifteen, Karen came by one night to speak with KirstenÂ’s mother. Karen was retiring. Having lost the sparkle of her most promising student, Karen could no longer bare to be in the dance studio. But she didnÂ’t admit so much to KirstenÂ’s mother.
Kirsten continued on with dance, more out of habit than anything else. When she befriended E, he fell immediately in love with her or so he thought. What he really loved was that dream, that ideal that had slipped away from Karen when she was young and which had slipped away from her once again in her later years with KirstenÂ’s growing indifference. With new teachers who couldnÂ’t really teach Kirsten much, dance took on new meanings. It was a way to make time, life disappear. So much of her time seemed to be spent just stretching or sitting on the hard wood of the studio floor, watching other girls out there, working their routines or learning new moves. The hours in the studio dissappeared with almost no sense of memory or recollection. What she got from dance, a false sense of security, had been destroyed. She had always wanted to dance for the rest of her life, until it came to be that dance gave her nothing. Now she talked about fantasy but it was just that. A dream. And she knew it. Only E believed the dream.
The nights with Dean were the best thing going on; they were real.
Kirsten would grow into a very attractive woman whose undoing was her good looks. They made her life easy and allowed her to avoid her dreams. It wasnÂ’t that she didnÂ’t have a powerful mind; she did. But it was that she didnÂ’t appreciate certain nuances of reality that would have allowed her to succeed in so many ways. She would always be able to plug numbers together, she would always be able to remember the turn of certain phrases, always be able to recapture a melody overheard many years earlier. But she lacked an analytical bent needed to figure out certain truths. Had she realized just how much her good looks could get her, she might have gone far and excelled, indeed.
Kirsten looked across the table at her teenage sister, who, just now awakening at noon after an extremely late night, was already radiant. “Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked Kirsten. “What is it? YouÂ’re not going to give me shit, are you? You stayed out too late a few nights when you were my age.” It wasnÂ’t that. Kirsten knew that one of the reasons Lauren liked to spend nights at her big sisterÂ’s place was to be out of her motherÂ’s sight, to be able to stay out as late as she liked, come home a little drunk, a little stoned. Lauren sipped her hot chocolate, sat back into the thick bathrobe she was borrowing from her sister. Lauren was right. Seven years earlier, Kirsten sixteen and Lauren nine, they had a lot of conversations in which Kirsten told Lauren all sorts of stories about Dean, about drinking at DeanÂ’s house, going out with a bunch of DeanÂ’s friends from the football team and stealing streetsigns, about fucking Dean in the parking lot of McDonaldÂ’s. Kirsten had enjoyed herself thoroughly in high school. She smiled at Lauren. Lauren sipped the hot chocolate. She began to tell Kirsten about her adventures the previous night, which bore a remarkable resemblance to KirstenÂ’s in what seemed to be such a distant past. Lauren quieted down as Manny, Kirsten’s husband, ran into the room with his basketball under one arm and half a case of beer under the other, having forgotten something, his running shoes or his jacket. Soon he was gone and Kirsten and Lauren, after sharing a mutual smile, launched back into the story-telling once again. Lauren described in detail how she and a bunch of friends, a few from her swim team, a few from her drama class, had gone in search of fields with cows to do some cow-tipping. They finally found a perfect field on the edge of town, seemingly isolated so they might approach the sleeping cows without worry. But once they managed to get themselves, all quite drunk, over the fence and into the pasture, an angry bull came charging at them. They only barely got away alive it seemed. Kirsten wanted to reprimand her sister, but thought better of it, knowing it was only harmless fun. And then, with a flourish, her sister was gone.
Watching her run out of the house, Kirsten, alone on a Sunday looking towards noon, could not help but reflect on high school and the boys who existed now only as memories. She had no idea what had happened to E. She was not entirely without affection for E; she looked back on him fondly and thought well of his ideas, his constant talk about the future and possibilities, about getting out into the real world and doing something magnificent. God knows she loved Dean. He was the center of her world for so long, even though she tried to pretend he wasn’t, tried to hold on to the precious persona of the cold ballerina. Kirsten had some memories of Karen, from when Kirsten was still young, maybe ten or eleven years old. For some reason, Kirsten most vividly remembered going home with Karen one night and seeing her apartment, the second floor of a two family home. It was in a perfectly normal blue collar neighborhood, but entering Karen’s apartment was like entering a different world. There were simple black and white photos on the walls, mounted on white cardboard backgrounds. They were pictures of New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago – the cities of Karen’s youth. She had danced in all of them, though never in any major shows or on any important stages. Mostly she had danced in performance pieces in delapidated back alley buildings that had just received a fresh coat of paint. She also taught and took many different classes and had remnants from them all of the room – the slippers from her Chicago ballet class, the bowler hat from doing Cabaret in San Francisco with a predominantly drag cast, a sash from a small show that satirized beauty pageants. In rare moments like these, Karen stripping down to a slip, lighting a cigarette, and putting some tea on the stove, Kirsten was amazed and in love with her dance teacher. She wasn’t a mean old lady always criticising, but a woman, sexy as hell, confident in herself, and ready to indoctrinate Kirsten into a feminine world very different from the world of Kirsten’s mother. Karen never spoke in depth of her affairs with men, probably because Kirsten was so young, but she occasionally touched upon them and hinted at untold pleasures. She gave Kirsten a glimpse of what it meant to be worshipped. Regardless of whether or not the men in Karen’s life had actually worshipped her, she imagined they did, and was happier for it. Karen was the complete woman for Kirsten, and she wanted to be her.
Had she been younger, Karen would have loved to talk with E and would have fucked Dean within an inch of his life. Kirsten was certain of it. By the time these guys were in her life, Kirsten was acting on programming of who she thought she was supposed to be. Dance was playing less a part in her emotional life; she just didn’t care anymore. But she was still a dancer. She was still an artist. She had just discovered the word Bohemian. She would have existential conversations with E and experimental sex with Dean. E had no idea why Kirsten never answered his letters when he left for school. Dean had no idea why she never returned his phone calls when he was home on leave from the Army. This boho self-concept of hers had begun to fade. The programming had become old. Her aspirations took a turn towards reality.
The Sunday afternoon was gone before it began and Manny and Kirsten had a few friends, two married couples they knew from college, over for dinner. Over beers, Manny talked about high school fondly and Kirsten gazed at him, wondering about what Lauren would think of this evening and its conversation. She knew Lauren was over a friendÂ’s house, learning dance moves for the cheerleading squad. Kirsten didnÂ’t altogether disagree with Manny that high school had been a great time, even though they hadnÂ’t known each other in high school. Kirsten hadnÂ’t expected to become a kindergarten teacher, but then, on that evening, listening to the lulling singsong quality in MannyÂ’s voice as he reminisced, her chin resting on her fist resting on her arm resting on the table and she couldnÂ’t quite remember what she had wanted to be when she was in high school, where she had wanted to end up. She looked fondly at Manny, the second beer beginning to make her a little tired. Lauren would look onto this evening of her sisterÂ’s, a couple of friends in their early twenties having a quiet night together, and tell Kirsten she was lame, she was clueless, she had sold out, given up her dream. Kirsten would have no idea what her younger, more idealistic sister was talking about. Lauren talked on and on about fame and fortune, it drove their mother crazy. Kirsten had been the talented one, with eighteen years of dancing before she finally quit, and nothing had come of that. What did Lauren have to show for herself? What promise did she have? None. Clearly. “Get it out of your head,” Kirsten told Lauren, trying to be honest, parroting what their mother said only behind LaurenÂ’s back. “ItÂ’s not going to get you anywhere. Even if you end up somewhere, say New York or California, where you could be a super-star, itÂ’s an empty, insecure life. People from here donÂ’t just go there and do that. Marry a nice guy like Manny, live a good life. Get a house. All I would tell you is to get a degree in business or finance, something where you can make good money. My art history degree is worthless.” And then Lauren would carry on and on about wanting to go to NYU or some other big school, not a little liberal arts college like Kirsten, and Kirsten, beginning to realize for the first time in her life that she had more in common with her mother than with her sister, would start to tune Lauren out. She was uncomfortable with this but didn’t know why. It was because she had chosen the fantasy of happiness over the reality of dissatisfaction. And while this choice would never completely undermine her, it would treat her to a chronic anxiety which would play with her, tickling her and irritating her just under her skin.
Someplace, somewhere, deep down, I couldn’t deal with the life I had discarded – the easy path, the corporate future, the BMW in my DNA. What was I doing out here, on the left coast, drunk on the beach well after midnight? As the waves lashed at the outcropping of rocks in front of me, the tentacles of the sky demons waved at JacksonÂ’s head and worked their ways in to my own maddened mind. Jackson seemed so evil to me that night. She was my closest friend. Whenever I was down, she would always laugh at something I would say and the smile would be like a blood transfusion that would bring me back from the brink, but at that point, right then and there, I felt like she was the demons in the sky, she was reaching into my head and torturing my brain. It was because all she ever did was laugh. She never listened. She never responded. The art of the conversation was dead. No one ever seemed to be listening. I wanted someone to argue, I wanted someone to observe. It was like it was a dead tradition – searching for the organic conversation was hunting whales with spears. I would go off half heartedly about Wagner or some other ancient dramatist about whom I knew nothing and get nothing more than a giggle. I would go off about Nietzsche or Kundera or some other relatively recent genius about whom I truly cared and get the same giggle. I was pretentious. I was a bore. I was a snob. An intellectual elitist. Get a giggle. Always get a giggle. And at the bars, all the Hoffmans, all the different species of Hoffmans, talking about a band, talking about a role, talking about a screenplay, talking about a job, about a gig, about a million, about a billion, and here I was, on the leftover time of a Saturday night, preparing to rip my clothes off and shout at the ocean in frustration. Someplace, Stacia was sitting on a porch, a patio just like mine in Bay City, sniffing the sweet smell of the night blossoms, and reading a poem in Hungarian, wondering who out there in this city might appreciate it. I tore off my clothes and dived into the cold pacific. It felt as if I were swimming in a sea of crabs with dry ice pincers until my skin became numb. Then I let myself drift below the surface and allowed the oceanÂ’s anesthesia to work its magic. I forgot about my frustrations, forgot about Jackson, forgot about Hoffman, forgot about the bargain clown mart. I formed a single image in my mindÂ’s eye, Stacia, and I grew determined. I would find her, I would see her again.