Imperial Stout

She’s wearing flip-flops and her toenails are too long.  Not disgustingly so, not unclean or unkempt – they just need a trim, which to her feels like a failure of self care and self respect.  How does one ensure they shave their legs and feet each day and yet disregard their toenails?  It’s like washing the rugs only to put them back on a dirty floor.  Unthorough.  Mid-morning and she’s pours herself chocolate milk in a tall Tupperware cup, pink and partly translucent.  Her hand shakes a tiny bit and the slight palsy goes unnoticed.  She has things to do.

Eighties, very thin, very hard, very certain she unlocks her phone and begins her podcast, news in the morning, stories in the afternoon – voices that carry and soothe and amuse her any time she needs them.  Voices that say clever and interesting things and she smiles at the wonder of her technology and her experience of it – wonders at the ‘return to radio’ this phone has given her – this return to the voice that has always promised and always delivered.

Phone tucked into the pocket of her loose house dress she moves slowly and carefully to the livingroom, ‘I’m eighty-two’ she announces with a kind of pride and a healthy dollup of argumentative, ‘I do every damn thing slowly.  It’s wise and it’s my right.’  Clear, clipped and practiced neutral voices emanate from her pocket, the middle east is on the brink of war and auto workers are on strike.  ‘Yep,’ she agrees.  Settling on a high stool (anything lower is hard to get out of, ‘easier to fall off than to climb out’) she places her milk on the work table and hums between the peril and around the tragedy that is every day, around the panic that has been every day for as long as she can remember.  Always on the brink of horror and threat, always with danger, always with fear… but she stopped blowing in that breeze long ago.  The world has been on the edge of end for as long as she can remember, and yet…

As she hums, her hand slides over the paper before her, the rasping of rough skin on Bristol Smooth and the sure appearance of one line after another that will join (or not) and will be beautiful (or not) and will be a part of her moment in this work right now.  When her lips were fuller and her tits higher she’d been gifted a Rapidograph by a lover and had spent hours studying a nostril or the curve of a hip, creating in the cracks of her existence, between the cries of her children and the beatings from her husband, between burned dinners and part time shifts at the laundromat.  She’d learned how to find peace in a moment, in a line, in the way her wrist felt as she placed an arc on the page. 

Her children call it a gift, her ability to drop into content in a moment of despair.  She’d stopped correcting them years ago.  This is no gift.  It is a skill, honed through the horror and panic that arrives in the moment you come to terms with your own death, even as your body fights for air and your blood fights to flow.  It is a decision to matter when the world tells her she doesn’t, ‘screw them’ she mumbles, kissing her teeth.  It is a resolve to remain gentle when the world finds clever cruelty so appealing.  It is a choice she made so long ago it feels like instinct.

Today she has oil pastels, black and greasy and heavy and they smudge so delightfully and feel so wonderfully childish and crude in her thin fingers.  Looking at her hands she smiles at the contrast between the black of her implements and the metallic blue of her nailtips.   Whimsy and fun and absurdity, she lives it.

Today she smiles and sips her milk and thinks about her afternoon walk and the sun on her hair and what time is a good time to call her middle son (he works nights and she doesn’t want to wake him up or interfere with his life overmuch … she remembers raising teenagers, she remembers the joy of finally having  a moment to breathe and wanting to just be herself and not someone’s mother or someone’s daughter and definitely not someone’s wife). 

Today her milk is rich and her legs shaved (she should not still generate so much hair, and yet…) and her smile broad and any fault in her toenails forgotten for the joy of the small shield bug that bumbled its way onto her lamp.  She names him Francis and watches him explore and smiles and draws.

The morning slides along, golden rays glinting in her hair as she sits back from her work and sighs accomplishment and satisfaction and critique.  The image is of an empty tire swing under an oak … an unmanicured yard of flowers and grass and just the edge of a large southern porch.  She’d never lived there … she’d never even seen the place outside movies and television.  That picture was never her reality, but she recognizes and nods to the ability it has to conjure happiness and feelings of innocence and hope and freedom. 

Her critique was in the realization that she was working in the cliché, that she’d found nothing new in the image, she’d not expressed anything unique to her, she was regurgitating the work of everyone before her, playing on the simplicity of humans to find a feel good moment but not an honest one.

‘You can do better’ she says, putting the picture into a box on the floor (from which her children and friends often took her pieces to hang on their own walls).

It is a determination to strive, to always be kind and to always do better and she never stopped.  She never resigned herself to the bitterness of aging and the jealousy toward the young. She gripped her pens and markers and crayons and fading strength in shaking hands and she created her reality and her world every day. 

She chose and she died knowing she never rescinded the power she had over herself. She grabbed the agency she could and she ran. She made it generous and genuine and honest and kind and strong and vicious.

She chose everyday until the capacity to choose was taken from her, and she died knowing her children too had the power to choose, and their children after them.

She died knowing that nothing ever really stops and nothing ever really begins and we are never as powerless as the powerful would like us to believe.