ruth
When my mother left the Kadisha Valley, she declined the offers of the priest, and the neighbor's son, and the schoolteacher, and the bartender from town, to drive her down to the transfer station, and walked to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill by myself, everyone already long gone behind her.
Gentlemen prefer blondes. So I had my hair processed blonde, and permed for good measure, and my boss's secretary said to me one day, when I was complaining about my hair, "Oh, your hair looks just like spun gold!" I'll never forget it. I think she liked me because I was empathetic to her; she was pretty mean to everyone else.
It wasn't a barricade exactly, and it would not keep him out for long, but she moved the cushioned bench up against the double bedroom door of the owners' suite. Long enough to find her other phone, this time to call for help. She couldn't call her father anymore; when she called girlfriends, the humiliation to her husband made him worse the next day. She heard his footfalls on the stair down, and knew he'd been to the gun closet. She heard his footfalls come up the front staircase.
"Yes, sorry, this is Nicolene Keller, four-two-eight Remington Lane. My husband, he is irate, I need someone to come help me."
"Are you in danger now?"
"He is outside the bedroom door shouting. It's locked."
'Do you have weapons in the house?"
"Yes, I think he has . . . "
"Okay, we are dispatching. Stay on the line, Mrs. Keller."
"Nicolene, open the goddamned door."
"He's shouting. He's shaking the door."
"Where are you, Mrs. Keller?"
"In my bathroom now, there's no lock, well the toilet has a lock."
"Okay, Mrs. Keller, someone is on the way, please go into the room you can lock."
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. He stopped shouting.
"Mrs. Keller, it's Officer Boyce."
She opened the toilet door.
"Mrs. Keller?"
"Yes, thank you."
"Mrs. Keller, are you hurt?"
"No."
He looked at the chaise in their bathroom.
"Mrs. Keller, please sit down. We're going to question your husband. He's been removed from the house. Are your children here?"
"No, at school."
"Okay, Mrs. Keller, can you tell me what happened?"
Who named this town Sensible, New Jersey? Without context, without its being a word, it sounded like a drug, like the ones developed by the factories up and down Route 1 from Newark into Manhattan. Ask your doctor if Sensible is right for you. But it turns out that Sensible is an old name, and that they came over from Denmark and were called Cincible. Van Gogh's mother-in-law was a Cincible. Half of them went to Pennsylvania and half continued to Missouri, and the Pennsylvanians migrated from the Port of Philadelphia across the Delaware River, where they set up mills and sewed the fabric they made and baked and made bricks and dug trenches for streetcar track and became chemists and learned to make the kerosene that they exported to Canada and out west. Did you know the first oil company in the world, Standard Oil, the one the Rockefellers started, they got the idea right here in what is now Sensible, New Jersey?
the word conjures prairie, self-reliance, Americanism, windswept hardship. but today we have dojos and chidren striving for university scholarships and standardized tests. and when they get kicked in the head at practice, the concussion knocks them un-sensible
When I catch myself hoping, I catch myself. What does it accomplish, to hope? Why are we told that hope is essential? I think it is more important that we feel agency to make the things occur, that we desire to occur. To feel you have power to help those you love, that is truly happiness.
fuses. the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my being. i don't remember the exact words of the poem, or who wrote it--whitman? but that we could see the new science, the new interest in knowing how things work and not merely that a god--God--created them and that they were unknowable to us. We could know, we could learn, soon we would have no need of God and other creation myths.
He wanted to be in the role of adviser to her, to take her on as a project, to take her raw materials and refine them, to take her half-considered ideas and flesh them out, and, of course, he wanted a sexual relationship with her as he did these things. She already turned him on. But he could make her into a woman he'd be proud to have everyone know he was fucking.
To me the loveliest symbol of the change in the preoccupations of artists, in their freedom, from the depiction of religion and the court to that of our everyday life, is the appearance in art of women in aprons, bundling switching in their husbands' fields, and resting there to have their midday meal, latter day madonnas, and closer to us, and a truer reflection of our lives than any biblical depiction of St. Sebastian.
It does sound old-fashioned to say, but thinking of him, my heart made a racket. Was it my age, nearing fifty, or was it the unaccustomed rush of love that assaulted me whenever I thought of him? I could hardly sleep for the pounding, and when my sorry heart was not pounding, it was beating erratically and loudly while I lay very still inside my secret.
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