Outline of My Lover
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Outline of My Lover - Douglas A. Martin
I.
A) Let Hover
We’re taken to a place with no roots. The house was red brick, divided into one, two, three living quarters. Across the street is an abandoned building. I am already a morbid child and wish it were a mausoleum, a place for me to sleep, among rich ancestry and traditions that glow particularly romantic. There are some concrete sewer pipes. When we are trying to be a family with the new man, my mother’s new husband, we will go for rides down any and all streets we can find, looking at houses decorated inside and out with Christmas lights. It is too expensive for the electricity to do our own house. This is how we are together. My sister and I in the back seat trying to stay warm. When we weren’t in the house, there would be a possibility for magic, something new. We would sit quietly in the back seat, looking at the lights. Lights like stars, but closer.
This was the season for change, time you could not sleep for your excitement towards some unknown promise, coming in life. One more day, more morning. One more exaltation to last through.
One morning you would wake up and it would be there.
Always as a child, I started pretending. I was pretending I was a girl. I was acting. I was a girl. I pretended I could have what I wanted. That I could change the world with just my wishes, just like that.
Soon as I grew up I wanted other things. I started pretending like I could have those too, like I knew no better.
If I jump out of the trees, I will fly. I think. I don’t know why I think this. Or know this, know I feel like nothing else I see on earth. Not yet. I harbor myself up there in the big magnolia tree. Boys climb trees so maybe I still am one. Maybe there is hope and a chance for me, still. Maybe. If I sit in the tree long enough. I’m not allowed to have pets because of my breathing, how I can barely. No dogs, no cats. Their furs aggravate my condition. I want something that is mine to care for, any kind of pet whatsoever.
At first I pretend the birds are my pets. They belong so completely to me I don’t even have to keep them in cages. They roam free to the universe, and I love them so well, they always return to me.
My mother leaves my sister in the crib to take me to the playground, push me on the swing. It’s right outside the back door, when we still live in the North, close to my mom’s parents.
A time before I can remember, which only comes down to me through stories.
I don’t want to play with the other boys. The pigskin became a sign of dad’s drunkenness which led to fights, which come to conclude our family.
I’m still very small, still share a room with my sister. We are told to play with the other kids next door, the boys who have a father and want to be Superman. I make excuses why I should want to be someone else. Somebody has to be the girl, I say. There has to be at least one.
I am used to playing with my sister, my sister who lets me pretend I’m like her, a girl, so I’m not the only one like me in our family. I want the boys shut out of the system of my universe, because you can’t keep them there. They’re always flying off. But you can’t escape them.
Meanwhile, my sister and I fight over which of us gets to be what girl on what TV show.
My sister will never have to try to be as smart as me. She was born with the higher IQ. Her genius is recognized. All through school when she gets to join the few smarter children for private lessons. We are attracted to the same brother down the street, but she’s allowed to want to marry him. She’s allowed to want what she wants, to go after it and get it, be secure in that knowledge.
My sister’s friends become my friends. My mother’s friends become the women I hear talk, voice concerns, sit around the table with at dinner time while the men sit in front of the television, watch sports, drinking like my father. Television blares.
My mother never truly believes in our young passions. Either that or she has what she feels are our best interests at heart. Particularly, I speak of an adolescent desire for fame. I always wanted to be known, for someone to know I exist.
My mother asks me if I know how many people want to be what I want to be. Do you know how many people can be? I will try all the avenues, exhausting them. I work on my body, work on my dancing, try to teach myself to be anything. I will even settle for the background a stage.
Acting, I memorize dramatic monologues.
Or I start writing books in the third grade, start, stop, full of characters I try constantly to be.
Anything to forget where I’ve come from, coming from where I do, that I might belong forgotten soon.
I always imagined my father with black hair. My mother, my sister and I are all blonde, so blonde it’s white as children, and that’s where I’m left, who I’m left with so must be where I belong.
That’s where I go, with the women. With the fair-haired ones, the women I learn to talk like, first thing. Divided along those easy lines of distinguishing characteristics. When they divided their mutual possessions from the marriage, my mother got the kids.
I don’t know how long it was before my father left my mother that he returned to his parents. Remarried, had more children, worked on cars, worked so hard he had to unwind, never had time to write.
The boy I was never gets a birthday card or a card for Christmas.
Nothing from his father, no contact.
Father from the North, who moved us South. The father the boy will do nothing to ever continue the line of.
Third grade, history. They are telling us all in the classroom to hate England even though that’s where we come from. We’re nothing like that monarchy, the mother country. The teacher lists all the reasons for disdain we should memorize. I run home to mother and think I’m smart, so smart, and my mother who spent girlhood in England once saw the queen wave, along with the beauty of romance, told me all about the excitement she felt. She watched from the bridge, a road, how alive she felt, how beautiful this tradition was. How beautiful it could be.
I never forget that perspective my mother gives me, my own evaluation in the face of what I’m being told. An unaccepting mind grows restless. My mother makes me doubt school a long time ago, so I go back and begin to question everything, all my teachers.
We are left alone to fend for ourselves, my mother and her kids. No man in your house, even though I’m told by so many people that’s what I have to be now. It was better for everyone involved including us kids that they separated and my father left.
There are men everywhere. We see that, my sister and I. But none are ours. We don’t belong to anything surrounding us it feels like at times. The Church, town, school system.
The church has asked us to leave if my mother is going to divorce, to get away from the man whose fists come raining down.
At school we are the kids we play with who can swallow our entire lives, trash. I forget how to breathe. I tell my sister time and again that I am dying, repeat it until she calls our mother where she goes to work at the hospital during the day, leaving us so she can afford to feed us.
I need to be taken there.
I can never forget the feeling of my childhood and the hospital I lived in once. The nuns from the Catholic Church come to see me because already I’m close to death. I lie there with lungs breath is a struggle for, to even perform the function they’re made for.
With rosaries, they come. Plastic blue beads and jade, mother of pearl, white diamonds.
The oxygen tent is clear plastic I lie under and look out at the world through. They come in habits, a procession of them to tell me, inform me, they are praying for