the intimacy of spit

I'm standing in a bathroom that is not mine, in front of the mirror above the sink, wearing my sister's Elliott Smith T-shirt and another girl's red flannel, suddenly surprised that I look almost exactly like both of my parents did when they were younger.

I'm holding someone else's toothbrush.

It looks exactly the same as the one I accidentally left at home.

The girl with the overused giggle whose flannel I was wearing because I was cold had told me I could use hers if I wasn't too grossed out about it. I don't know why I accepted the offer.

Though we both have braces, the bristles of her toothbrush are softer and less abused than mine.

I try to treat them gently.

I am brushing my teeth with someone else's toothbrush and it is the most intimate moment I have ever experienced in my life, and I am not sure how I feel about that fact.

The owner of the toothbrush is in another room. Her sleeves are too short for my arms, of course, and I stare at the face of my parents in the mirror, thinking how frightening and comforting it is that I am fifty percent of both of them. And how people are made up of genetics and choice, how perhaps I am really made of fifty percent of each of my parents' decisions, and that's what I'm looking at in the mirror. Maybe I am made up of the cereals they bought and the music they listened to and the mistakes they made and the memories which they kept and threw away.

Later, I tell the girl with the overused giggle and the soft-bristled toothbrush about how my sister and I used to get a copy of M magazine - a Tiger Beat type tabloid for preteen girls - at the airport each year when we were younger. And how our dad would read it in his special serious story-time voice, making up for unread bedtime stories, teaching us not to trust the media. Like a good dad. And how he would burp a lot, because of the medication he used at the time, and how he would blow it toward the ceiling so we wouldn't have to smell it.

Gross things can be startlingly intimate.

In a gruesomely beautiful way.

I remember the years when my sister and I began to buy M magazine and no longer knew the celebrities it talked about, because we had grown out of it. We were too old. We were not only too old for bedtime stories, we were too old to make up for bedtime stories, and that was a very sad thing, but I don't mention that part when I tell the story.

I don't use the little rubber tongue bristles on the back of the toothbrush, and when I am done I wash it out carefully and reposition it in the cabinet above the sink, thinking about the grossness of kissing and what people are supposed to do with the spit in their mouths.

When we watch Breakfast at Tiffany's later that night, during the kiss at the end, the giggling girl who let me borrow her toothbrush starts laughing uncontrollably. I ask her quietly what is so funny, and she whispers back, spit, and laughs at my previously mentioned lack of understanding.

Kissing is far more romantic than a borrowed toothbrush, of course, but it is no less intimate in terms of spit.

And no one hardly ever mentions the gruesome intimacy of spit. Or how it holds the DNA of our parents' choices, spilling into our morning coffee.

I don't know.

It's just a thought.

egg nog

I'm drinking egg nog in the kitchen, thinking about the old woman whose snow I helped brush off of her car earlier today, and I am wondering if she is thinking of me.

I'm remembering how pretty she was when she looked up, how I hopped out of the car without my bible and asked if she would like some help. It was snowing gently and kindly, and the little brown birds were landing gracefully out of the soft gray sky, all in the same tree, and she asked me where I lived. I answered simply with, "I'm one of Jehovah's Witnesses," arms out, palms up, waiting, and she nodded, handing me her scraper with an understanding nod of yes, this is your job.

Her eyes were blue, but not bright, and I lean against the counter top, listening to the cartoon my little sisters are watching together. I'm wondering if the woman -- Mary, her name was, Mary Montgomery, or something with a movie-star ring to it -- made it to Fort Lupton safely. I am remembering the clean swift swipe of powder falling on asphalt, the little silences it made, and I wonder quite suddenly what Charlotte will look like when she is old enough for young people to get out of their cars to help her. I am wondering if her eyes will lose their color, like the moth in my dream.

And I remember, much later, when the egg nog is forgotten, the laughter in Martensen's voice in the marching band closet, when he said, "You were meant to grow old," as if a great number were simply not. I am wondering where they end up, those who do not wear hairnets in the snow and shuffle around their cars, and who are not excited to see their families in Fort Lupton for the holidays. I wonder of the grace with which they handle their wheelchairs, spinning above stagelights and snowflake decorations, like naughty children who drink their fathers' liquor and do not believe in Santa Clause.

And I don't think to see him old.

I half-jogged back to the car in skirt and snowy boots, astounded at my strength, as if I had never noticed it before. The snow was young, and had fallen easily from the roof and windows as I maneuvered the simple tool in my arms across the windshield with eager ease and alacrity, asking about her family and stealing quick glances at her eyes, surprised at their beauty and surprised at my youth, reminding myself to smile.

sodium citrate

The garage door slammed shut, and my mother threw a white bottle of shampoo into my lap without warning. "This is what your father smelled like when I met him," she said, and walked into the kitchen to put away the rest of the groceries.

"I - but - what is it?"

"It just smells like herbs."

"Oh. But - so now I'm just going to smell like my dad?"

"Well fine, if you don't appreciate the gift --"

"No no, I do. Thank you for getting it, it's - it's lovely."

She gasped suddenly, opening the fridge. "So last night at the wine tasting," she said, "I went a little nuts, and ordered some sodium citrate online."

"Sodium citrate?"

"It's an ionic compound," she began, plunging into a long explanation of the chemical bonding process of sodium citrate, which I eventually stopped listening to. She ended her speech with, "...and it makes nacho cheese sauce. Do you understand what that means? We can make any kind of cheese into nacho cheese. Swiss nacho cheese. Mozzarella nacho cheese. The possibilities are endless."

I imagined something Breaking-Bad-ish was about to happen. She would give up midwifery and start some sort of nacho cheese chemical processing plant, selling it through secret vendors without a license. 

When it finally arrived in the mail, though, it was just a packet of salt. A pan of cheese bubbled on the stove, and my mother poured chilis into it from a jar as I watched the cheese with skeptical fascination and doubt. "How much sodium citrate did you put in?"

"I don't know. Some."

"You didn't follow a recipe?"

"Nah. It's probably okay. I think."

"Looks sort of mucousy."

"Yeah."

"I heard if you get sodium citrate in your hand, it will react to the fats in your skin and turn them into soap."

"Oh, so that's why it does this to cheese. Huh."

We were hungry, so we ate it, and it was good.

I was hoping for a better story.

pacifist

"I'll hold him down if you really want to punch him," Thomas said.

"Oh, I wouldn't really do it, I'm a pacifist," I responded. "Wait, why would you help me? What'd he do to you?"

"Nothing."

"You trust my sense of justice that much?"

"No, I trust your sense of vengeance."

"Why?"

"You're a pacifist. If you want to punch someone, they probably deserve it."

remembering

I tell stories.

It's what I do.

I tell what happened and how it felt and why it matters, what it meant. I explain jokes I never told.

Sara the freshman calls it vulnerability, Martensen calls it authenticity. There's strategy to it, I suppose. You want somebody's trust, you want them to open up the curtains over their eyes and knock down their walls, you've got to earn it. You earn it through your own stories. The bad ones. The ones you don't want to tell.

It's a trade. It's money. You take everything that's ever happened to you and weigh it into categories of worth and bargain it away for the trust of others. It's sales practices.

It's what I do.

I am cut into pieces, ready to give away, choosing customers with strategy and predetermined intention. It took a while to realize I don't tell stories because I want to tell them.

You start with a syllable. You stop, and start again. You finish the word this time. It's not a stutter, it's getting a hold on the weight of what you are about to say before you say it.

You tell it all, just how it happened. You say how it went from warm rocks to cold water. You feel it rise in your chest, as if raised from the dead. You raise it again and again. It's your money. It's your worth. You buy trust with vulnerability. You wear your heart on your sleeve because you know everyone else has one and you want them to feel safe with that fact.

Or maybe you just don't care about your own heart all that much. Maybe it's just live bait.

The stories don't leave when you tell them. The weight doesn't go away. You either feel it or you bury it, but it's always inside you, and it never leaves. It is only a matter of resurfacing. Then you lie awake in the cold of the dark and feel the remembering in your chest. It is worn and faded and pulsing like an unhealed wound. You breathe it in and breathe it out and wait to forget it again.

You don't.

It's your money, and you spent it, and it never left.

You want it to. That's why you sell it.

The remembering has its own weight, its own worth, its own pain, as tangible as oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and it sits in your lungs and presses against the walls. You remember me, it says. But it is quieter now, less agonizing, more bearable. You can breathe around the remembering. The more you awaken it, and stir it around, the sooner it remembers how to settle.

It seeps back into the marrow as you fall asleep in its arms.

tribute

We're lying in the dark, under the rickety tables in the back of the drama room.

It's the simplest of all drills. Fire drills and tornado drills, we have to march, you know? We have to crowd in the bathrooms, or line up in the parking lots. There's effort. There's movement. Lockdowns, though, you just sit. You turn off the lights, and you sit, and wait.

Lockdowns stress the hell out of me. Nothing else really does. It's the peace and quiet, you know? You're sitting there hiding and you can't make a sound, you can't laugh it off, can't joke it away. Because then the imaginary gunman will hear you. Whether he hears you or not, though, he knows most of the classrooms have kids in them. He is not fooled by the dark.

It's the beginning of the Shakespeare class, in the morning, and we're lying way in the back of the room, against the wall, on our backs, staring up at the bottoms of tables. The doors are closed, and the lights are off, and I'm thinking about last year's lockdown drill, how I had volunteered to be the "classroom ninja," standing guard at the door by the scissors drawer, and how I didn't know how to fight a gunman with scissors, so I had to google it, and the teacher thought that was funny. I didn't tell anyone I was so useless. They trusted me with their lives every day in that class, or they just didn't think about it.

I'm lying on my back, staring up at the table, with one knee raised in the illusion that I could get up and run if I had to, and Charlotte is lying next to me, on her side. Her heart isn't like mine, it panics and worries, but this time it is slow and sleepy and peaceful. Mine is typically steadier and calmer than hers, but just this once, I'm scared. I'm not scared of an imaginary gunman, I'm scared of the world we live in, and Charlotte reaches out and wraps her hand around my rib cage.

She is the safest thing in the entire building. We are in the safest room, with the best hiding corner, and the thickest walls. We are also in the back of this room, with at least twenty kids in front of us, curled up on the floor, sitting against the walls, whispering to each other and playing games on their phones. Charlotte's optimism is like handmade armor. She melted that metal. She welded it. She put it on herself.

She buries her face in my shoulder.

It's been fifteen minutes or so, and I'm thinking about the editorial I wrote last year about how lockdowns are like duck-and-cover drills. I'm remembering how one kid asked the cop pointed questions about locks and bullets and bricks and backs. I'm remembering how the cop looked sad. I have my hand on her elbow, and I'm thinking about bombs dropping, hiding under tables like this, and how all it really takes to kill a bunch of people is wanting to. That's all it really takes. There's nothing else we can do. Of course they'll know to shoot towards the floor. Of course they'll know we're in the classrooms, even though the lights are off. Of course they'll be able to open the door.

I'm remembering how Mr. Wood told me I should get that editorial published.

I'm remembering how I never did.

Someone somewhere is snoring very loudly, and Charlotte plays with the fabric of my shirt absent-mindedly, and it is dark, but not that dark. It is quiet, but not that quiet. Someone near me lashes out in the dark, and there is a sudden bang, like a high-pitched explosion, something hard hitting the metal leg of the table. No one is snoring anymore. "Oh, crap," someone whispers. "I think I got coffee in your hair, Shady."

"It's okay," I whisper back. "I've had kids throw up in my hair. Now I just get to smell like coffee." A few kids giggle appreciatively as I reach back and feel the completely underestimated sticky wetness at the back of my head. It is dark, but not that dark, and the snoring starts again. The floor is comfortable and I am tired but I am too scared of the world we live in to sleep.

No one asks the cop any questions this time. We just keep lying in the dark.

The floor is terrifically dirty, but we aren't thinking about that, and one of my hands is on Charlotte's knee and the other is on her elbow and she is the safest thing in the entire building because I googled how to stab a gunman with scissors almost a year ago. "Most schools in America won't have to use these drills," she will tell me later. "Most husbands don't kill their wives."

In the margin of a used copy of The Things They Carried, on page 31, after the sentence, "But the war wasn't all that way,"  there is a single written note which states, simply, "But enough of it was."

Enough of them will. Enough of them do.

So we lie in the dark and we think about dying. The drama teacher pulls on the ends of his shirt collar, which is what he does when he is nervous or bored, and I can't reach the Snapple cap in my pocket, which I pop when I am nervous or bored. It is dark, but not that dark, and I crane my neck backwards towards the door, which is locked, but which might as well be unlocked, because we don't play rock-paper-scissors with guns, do we?

We don't know how.

Most husbands don't kill their wives.

She welded her own optimism and she buries her face in my shoulder.

It is dark, but not that dark.

leafbug

We had sweet potato fries for dinner last night.

My mother had worked pretty hard on the meal, harder than she had in weeks, and cooking meals is sort of her creative platform. There was chicken and salad and a big bowl of avocado sauce: not guacamole, but avocado sauce.

None of us had ever seen anything like it, but my mother's leaps of creativity are almost always successful, so we trust them. If not, it is only for having gone too far, which, in the art world, is usually a good thing.

She was in a fairly bad mood, because no one had been brave enough to pour enough of the green foamy sauce onto their food, and because she had worked hard on it. My siblings and stepfather and I were eagerly reassuring her of her talent and heart, and our love and appreciation for her and all that she does. She pouted and rolled her eyes and passive-aggressively stabbed at her plate with her fork.

"I found a bullet," my brother said suddenly and unexpectedly, producing out of his breast pocket a small round copper object of significant size and shape.

"Where did you find that?!" my stepdad asked, suddenly offended at its presence.

"On Green Street," he said, turning the bullet around in his fingers, searching desperately for affirmation and praise for his discovery. "It makes me wonder, you know, why was it there? What size is it, what gun, you know? Who fired it? Why?"

"Put it away!"

"Okay." He tucked it back into his pocket, with all the shame and sorrow in his eyes of a child whose refreshingly strange excitement has been shot down.

The dog was scratching at the backdoor, and my stepdad opened it and spoke to her in his special dog voice, which I have always found demeaning, even though most people do it. He walked out and closed the door, while my mother glared at the bowl half full of avocado sauce which would not be eaten.

My stepdad returned a few moments later with his hands cupped together, face filled with childish excitement as the dog slipped into the house from behind him. "Guys, guess what I found!"

"What?!" The kids kicked their little legs under the table, grinning and laughing.

"A leafbug!" he said, holding onto the edge of its wings with his fingers so it didn't fly away.

The three children cheered. "A leafbug?" my mom said, turning around. "Hey, I wanna hold it!" He placed it into her hands, and the kids climbed off the benches and crowded around her.

They marveled at its smallness and color, its delicate wings, the unbelievable sureness of life in its little green frame. My brother reached his hand out to pick it up, and my mother told him, "Hey, it's my turn!" They were all just six years old again, fighting over holding a bug at the dinner table.

"Come on, Heather," my stepdad said. "It might fly off."

Right as he said that, the bug spread its leaves and flew clumsily and noisily into the air over the table. The girls screamed, and the boy shouted, and my stepdad scoffed, "Heather!" and the bug landed in the middle of the almost-empty pan of fries, folding its wings, embarrassed.

"See?" my mother said. "It didn't go very far."

No one did anything but sit back down and finish eating. We watched the insect wander around the pan for a while. "I think it's missing a leg," my stepdad said, because it was limping like a cripple, and we all turned our heads to look it over. Sure enough, one of its back legs was missing. We made small sympathetic sounds, watching it limp around the pan, and I made a joke about having a leafbug over for dinner, and my stepdad said I should take it outside.

"Grab it by the wings," he said.

"I'm not going to do that," I apologized, and scooped it into my hands, explaining about damaging moths' wings and how maybe leafbugs are similar in that regard, and he nodded.

I sat outside and opened my hands, letting the leafbug wander around my fingers. It was an impressive little beast, really. Its tiny body heaved in and out, catching its breath from the adventure, twitching its antennae to taste the sweet outdoor air again. It crawled to the tips of my fingers and nibbled the potato grease off of its little hands and feet, one by one, taking its time before lifting off  over the fence and away.