Star Days by Loie Rawding
Photo by Alexandra Fuller via Unsplash
The Folgers instant coffee reminds me of my mother’s parents, now dead. The hard chunks of processed bean disintegrate with unsettling speed. This could be said of the way they showed their affection, but it is also not related to the memory of them at all. I’m standing in front of a window that I’ve never stood in front of before. Ashes of the cheap brew dance up the side of my cup, while the boiling water alchemizes in its electric kettle. The odor is a specter that must still creep around their little kitchen in the White Mountains, on the opposite side of the continent from where I am now.
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When I think of marriage, separate from love, I have zero point of reference. So, I think of Leah and Edwin working alongside each other all those long years. They were the pillars that refused to fall as their daughters’ lives were battered within twenty miles of the family home; androgynous bodies turned to the compost of divorce, violence, substance abuse, and sibling rivalry. I never wished for sisters because of the war room tactics between my mother and the three that followed her. It’s no small wonder I have a complicated relationship with women, an inherited predisposition to relate to the masculine with more ease, but I am hungry and trying.
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My grandmother took daily notes but it was not a diary. Diaries are frivolous, childish and a waste of paper, she might say. Maybe I hate dairies because of her. Daily notes, of course, are the opposite; an essential record of struggle and occasional good fortune. Crucial happenings followed by the permission to forget. A releasing. I want to know the things she willed to pass from memory to page, more than I want to know if she was tired of her bottom shelf coffee. In her logs, she tattooed the days she had sex the same way I bannered the names of middle school crushes. A five-point star, one line crossing itself over and over and over again. No mention of birth control, ever, but sometimes, a word to mark the start and end of her bleeding. I keep looking for the missing star that would smack glitter, like hope, on the face of her desire. Was this star a Sunday fuck, while the girls sullied their church clothes in the garden? I imagine Ed and Leah’s naked bodies dappled with light through the overgrown Christmas cactus at the foot of their bed, so dirty it rarely found opportunity to flower. I want this to be true for her but there is no mention. Just the one star that says something happened here.
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I wonder if pleasure was something to forget under the boughs of northern Baptist shame or something impossible to forget because it never happened in the first place. Leah was not one for making things up. Even her bedtime stories were scrubbed from the wallpaper of her childhood or the lives of her daughters tottering on the old rock wall of their modest property. Her father was a writer and a minister who went to state prison for a time. Even if she thought made up stories didn’t belong to her – I know she was made of some mighty dirty gifts and so, I am too.
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To investigate pleasure in the lives of Leah and Edwin Rawding would be to peer into an old quartz quarry and see only the cloudy emerald water of seven decades of seasonal rain. I recall their occasional tenderness as the gray smoke of sunrise rose up from their woodsy hill on summer mornings. Me, already awake and eating the generic cocoa puffs they kept in a low cupboard for us kids. They would put their hands on each other, a shoulder maybe or at the back of the neck. Never a sensual spot, I once thought, until I realized how sensual a shoulder can be. Until someone taught me the nervy awe of the back of my own skull.
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Leah was romanced by the potatoes in her garden; her lily pond where the peepers broke from their slippery eggs and eventually jumped into her cool palm. I imagine that Edwin loved caressing the smooth steering wheel on his drive to fill gallon jugs of the spring water that gushed from a dirt-mound some miles away. Windows down, languishing in the silence that only birds make. I imagine the bold release of that cold water onto the backs of his hands, splashing the front of his old Levi’s.
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Art feels too hard right now. I’ve decided I will become a falconer in my elder years. The term for acclimating your bird to your human-self is “manning.” There aren’t many women in the falconry world but when the time comes, I won’t mind. I will read to my bird every night until, like me, she has nothing left to fear. When I’m not reading, I will mark her feathers in memories that become stories. Stories that unwittingly expose memories. Words that call people to pleasure but escape understanding. Like hunting.
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I have a responsibility to raise my family to suck crab apple meat off the core, as Leah did. She was a most talented dilettante whose kink was animals who talk. More Wind in the Willows, than Disney. She taught us how to sew and iron and build furniture for dolls with scraps of real, human things. She felt things sparingly. A body divided into five has less nerve endings to fire. Did she dream of women as I do?
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Do I remember her hot flashes or have I invented this: a polyester dress, powder red, dark at the armpits, blowing in the breeze of a daughter’s back yard. It smells of horse manure and lemonade. She is eating a chocolate cupcake with rainbow jimmies; sweat beading in the fine hairs of her upper lip. A sigh that slips into a groan; a here we go again. Why can’t I recall my grandfather’s hunger, for her or for anything other than soup and a ride on his four-wheeler. Edwin loved electric blue.
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I am still standing at the window and trying to unpack the politeness that was expected of me at their church on Easter Sunday, the only time we attended. In the same breath, I consider putting some energy into the practice of edging when I get home. Delayed satisfaction. The minister called the children to the front pew and played his acoustic guitar, which I suspect gave him as much joy as his god and certainly a pleasure that didn’t demand any unnecessary delays.
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What would Leah have warned me about if she had remembered my name when I moved to Colorado with a man, got pregnant, had children? Eventually she left Edwin for the dirt. Released, he let a cancer fill her rocking chair and left soon after. Because of Edwin, I believe in the universe of implication when a Mainer asks about the weather.
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I’m interested in the way that pleasure gives us permission to break an otherwise well-greased machine of a body. Which are the wires that sear and snap when I put my palm into the space between two chest muscles with an ambiguous pressure as filthy as the smell of daffodils.
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My fantasies often take place in red light like the heat lamp that eyeballed out of the ceiling of Leah and Ed’s bathroom. I thought it was the artificial heat that compelled me; fantasizing a back pressed against the cold and cracking wall, breasts feigning a sun burn. But then, I started developing my own film in high school. That bloody light of the dark room, the polished glow of poison chemicals still damp on my fingers, showed me more. I took someone’s virginity under that red light. I became a hunter, wolf-like and possibly cruel. He didn’t tell me it was his first time so I spent two years manning him and then he set me free.
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It looks trite on the page, but I do think Leah’s pleasure was birdsong and the hummingbirds suckling the orange day lilies that grew from the stone patio that she built with her bare hands. I want to believe she enjoyed giving birth, but it’s more likely she reveled in the senseless rules that she imposed upon her daughters. Like, don’t play in the yard until the grass dries. Like, take the love that’s given.
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I think their shared pleasure was built on the work of living. Edwin was color blind, but each Christmas he shined under the mélange of red and green decorations made at the hands of his mate. He thanked me for the school pictures of the twins and asked me if it was cold wherever the hell I was living these days. I want to imagine Edwin playing Leah’s skin the same way he greeted his steel banjo; a tinny hello that dipped into her mouth and soured her breath. I am determined to find such a tender hello in the valleys between my teeth. It will hurt like biting into aluminum foil, like leaning into a desire I’m not supposed to have. Which of Leah’s dreams did I inherit; pictures of women whose bodies I want to love unlocked from the drawers of her vanity. Oh dear, Eddy, we are too old now to not know the truth of such things, said Leah to Edwin one night while watching the news in bed; my child body tucked between them.
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I drink the Folgers instant packs on a trip to the redwoods with friends who are also writers and desire as I do. From the window, I watch a blue-bodied wood pecker hop along the roof outside of the kitchen that reminds me of Ed and Leah’s, far away on Christian Ridge. All dried herbs hanging upside down from greasy, wood beams. We are of witches, my daughter tells me. The woodpecker dances with its own shadow, head cocked and bug drunk at eight in the morning. I think of my mother’s parents, now dead. I am very far away from my own mate, our children, and the top shelf coffee we brew at home. I am farther away from them than Leah had been from Edwin in more than fifty years before she died. I put a star in the corner of this page, started on the night before I left for California. Orgasms like truth. The star has become both a requisite and a pleading; a thing that wants to be ignorant of everything else but can’t be.
Loie Rawding is the author of Tight Little Vocal Cords, a finalist for the Big Other Book Awards and a Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Book of 2020. She is the co-founder of Fireside Ink Writers Workshop and a creative mentor to artists across the country. Loie and her family split their time between Boulder, CO and Cliff Island, ME. She is currently at work on her third novel-length project. For more: www.loierawding.com