The Mouth

Etta opened her front door and stood there in the doorway, looking. She did this every morning, and she made sure to dress accordingly in a morning gown and men's dress shoes and something hand knit on her head. It amused her endlessly- it was a great way to start your day, she'd say to her other aged friends. They would look askance, down or around the room, having learned nothing since high school about dealing with awkward statements. Fine women all, thought Etta; but not forthright in the right way. They were always forthright in the wrong way, dependably; they would offer nasty casseroles and tell sympathetic stories about whatever the conversation was tut-tutting that day. Her friends were practiced and veteran in these ways, which was great when someone died but left them speechless when Etta made her pronouncements. It was a shame, she thought.

There was a listener in the group. Her name was Jackson, "as in Michael" was her standard response when asked if it was a family name or her hyphen name or what it meant. "Jackson doesn't mean anything, it's a name" she said whenever asked, and she'd get cross if someone didn't accept that answer as the full one. Etta liked Jackson and vice versa. Jackson sat with her eyes on Etta when Etta made her pronouncements, and she had gained Jackson's friendship by holding still for the whole spiel: "everyone should dress like a crazy person on a daily basis," Etta half-bellowed, adjusting for the deafness of the audience. "People are wary of you right away. You can do what you like with that feeling, like make nice with some neighbor's boy or take some body's trash cans back in for them. It confuses them- it's a hoot. watch the faces when you do it. Pure entertainment."

"Etta you're not being nice, doing that. That's pretty...I was going to say snide, but that's not it. Manipulative, there you go. You're terrible." Jackson said this when everyone else was checking their feet or their Rummy scores.

"True, but I always think that doing the favor for them cancels out the bad intention- the ill will, if you like. I don't like that phrase, but since I don't know any other that fits- there it is. You can just talk to folks instead, but dressed like that makes me feel like I've gotten the jump on things. Like I put the day on notice."  Jackson laughed, and the ladies at the table laughed with a one-second delay, following her lead. She came to Etta's house in the morning when they weren't at the YMCA for their aquacise and their card table. Jackson took her life, and the lives of others, in her own nubbled hands when she drove over. This was almost every day. "People wander in, have you noticed that? People just wander to your doors or sometimes right in your windshield. In your sight, I mean- as if you weren't on the road. I realize that the podestreens"- Etta also liked when Jackson mispronounced words, because it was inexplicable, and she liked the inexplicable things in life- "yes, I know they have the right of way. Or we have to yield that to them. They get to walk wherever, to be specific." Jackson sighed and shook her head for less than a second. "But Etta! What is wrong with some of them? Why would they walk in front of an oldie behind the wheel of a large car? I'm a stereotype! Right there people should be careful." Etta laughed and laughed, and Jackson shone a smile back and didn't take offence.

This morning Etta didn't stand around silently challenging neighborhood acquaintances to remark on her hat, as per her usual. There was a giant sinkhole right in front of her house, in the street, so thorough that she could practically see seeping up from it the smoke from the bomb that must have put it there. It was a Bugs Bunny image, but a compelling one, and she ran in to call Jackson before her friend drove over and straight into it, yelling at out her window to alarmist, arm-waving podestreens that they should just clear a place for her the whole way. She caught her on the third ring, and started talking right away.

"Jackson, you have to not come to the front of the house this morning, or probably not the afternoon either. There is an enormous mouth in the street."

Jackson took this in her placid way, but Etta couldn't figure out if it was the compressed type of Jackson who would give some lip service to the notion of not coming and then come to right there, travelling five miles per hour faster than usual or if it was placid because of her poor sleep habits and lack of a quality cup of coffee. "Ok, honey, I'll not come to the front of your house. Because of a mouth. You said mouth, right?"

"Yes, right, don't come to the front. Let me check the alley in back." Etta put the phone down and went to look at the disappointing pot holes in the paving behind her garage. "The back is fine. But this hole-"

"Oh, it's a hole." Jackson's voice was still maddeningly placid.

"Yes, it's a big damn hole, and I saw not one but two cars just get swallowed. The first was just parked there- I'm serious, don't come to the front, Jackson- and the second was some dummy who drove up to it like he was on a dare. One should not fuck with nature's mouths. One should recognize them for what they are, dummy dum dum." She sighed. "They got him out by throwing some rope someone had in there to the dummy and he just grabbed hold, and they pulled."

"It's a nice neighborhood you have there." Jackson was compressed, so Etta let her get off the phone so she could come over. "Not the front, and be careful in the back, because who knows?"

Jackson was careful, for once. She came in the kitchen door, almost silently. "Did you see it?" Etta asked.

"Not yet. Give me the tour, then." Etta walked Jackson to the front, and then they both stood there in the door jamb, mouths barely ajar so that a sidewalk observer might think they both had taken a bite of something simultaneously and then stopped chewing. "That's a mouth, yes. It cannot be described any other way. And nature's mouths should not be ignored, like you say" Jackson whispered, needlessly. "What to do, though?"

Etta had thought about this. "It's getting bigger, Jack. It's gotten rounder, and smokier-"

"I don't see any smoke, darling-"

"Look for longer. Don't let your eyes get unfocused and trick you or anything, but just keep them lasering at that mouth for an hour and you'll see smoke. Anyway- it's bigger, it's widening so that it's creeping closer to the other side of the road, because there are more cars there. Look: It came to the curb on this side, and now it's lost interest. Sidewalk holds no interest for our Mouth."

"It's looking for cars, then." Jackson tilted one hip out like a cool kid.

"Yes, that's it I think. I can't see it wanting people, anyway- it's just pulling in the cars, and so far it doesn't really go for people, unless they're just idiots who can't comprehend it."

"I don't know what one could misinterpret."

"Me neither" Etta agreed. Then they went into the kitchen to make coffee, which she never drank more than a half-cup but which her friend would chug like a record-holding career drinker. It always reminded her of pitchers of light beer for $5 on weekdays.

"Let's watch the news. Did you watch any? We should just take a look, maybe there's some scientist explaining everything for us" Jackson said after two mug fulls. They moved to the parlor, which had the front windows facing the street-now-hole and the television. They turned it on, and, after a moment, Etta said "holy shit" in a stage whisper.

There were mouths everywhere, in every area of the city: downtown was the worst, and there had been the most cars consumed by a three-to-one margin compared to everywhere else. The north side was also a Daliesque hell scape of pits and disappeared cars and people not understanding, staying too close and getting sucked in because they just couldn't believe this weird new road feature was doing what it was doing. One of the more profound stories was of a deliver truck packed with new refrigerators and clothes dryers- that one was on the West side, and that hole had just opened beneath the truck, full-sized and apparently ravenous, grabbing and holding the whole thing as if it were a doomed cruise ship. The two deliverers were taken down with it, since they'd had little to no time to forge a plan of escape. There were rescuers at the scene, dangling a rope ladder from an adjacent tree and yelling downward, since their ambulance had been swallowed, too.

The ladies ran to the front of the house for another, now adrenalised look: their hole had widened, and deepened, and there were no cars anywhere near it. That morning the street had been parked out, but either the owners were canny enough to identify an approaching force of nature and moved their own cars, or the mouth had taken them. It came right up to the sidewalk, which it had left almost entirely unmoved. There was one square that had a wee upward tilt, so small that it could easily have been caused by the previous evenings' pre-crater hard rain. Etta took it upon herself to walk right up to the edge. Her friend ran back to the pantry, took the ladder from it and jogged back up to the front door. She waited. Etta stood there, looking into it and then looking around, and then looking into it.

"There's no more cars, and I don't really want to wrestle with alternate routes at my age" she said. Jackson sighed and went kitchenward again. Etta stood. A WGN helicopter went by, and she waved at it with a serious expression on her face. Jackson came out the front door, carefully letting her leg hang back so the screen door wouldn't bang (because she hated the sound.) She had the coffeemaker, still steamy, in her hands.

"Here." she said.

Etta took it and heaved it into the hole all in one motion. It made a lovely arc, and the cord twirled around above it so that for a second, at it's height, it looked like art.  "I don't think that's enough."

Jackson went back and forth, taking anything electrical she could find, any technology, to bring to Etta: her iron ("I have no idea why I have this thing in the first place,") her straightening iron ("ok, good, I can't help but burn my face any time I try to use it anyway, I know it's strange what with the design being safe and compressed, but I do it,") the computer that Etta's son-in-law had brought and lovingly installed that she used all of once a day to check the weather ("uh-huh.") By and by there was nothing left to pitch: Etta's house was as bare as it had been when she and her husband had set themselves up in it, when one just waited for water to boil rather than using a microwave and they only had a radio to listen to because they could afford neither the television nor the floor space to put it on. Etta had shooed her friend back when she'd appeared with the old radio. "It still works on a few stations."

Jackson turned around, saying "and it was yours," meaning it belonged to Etta and her departed. There were things that nature's prerogative would have to forgive.

Nothing happened for a long while. They went back in eventually. They'd both thought there would be some sign, some tic of noise from the earth, but there was nothing so they turned and walked back into the house, where they sat down in the front room. It was dim in the room since the sun had gone westward, and warm, and so the two friends ended up dozing, sagging toward each other on the dusty chintz sofa. They were woken by chopper sounds, closer and louder than they'd been before, and more consistent. The ladies sat up- slowly, decrinkling themselves- and stood. They looked at each other before they went to the door.

"This had better be good" said Jackson. Etta nodded.

Outside there were two helicopters hovering close to the hole. The first thing the women did was wave at them, arms all the way above their heads and back as if they were each the President of the United States. It was a fitting gesture: the day was saved, because their ministrations had coaxed the mouth into closing. It was clamping itself shut and making the expected ticking noises, which satisfied Etta and relived Jackson. Then they went back inside and turned on the  old radio, which was glad to be of service, and heard: all around the city  people had seen footage taken from the first news copter of Etta chucking things up and in, and Jackson enthusiastically finding new appliances, running into the house and back tirelessly, stronger than many half her age. The populace had taken the hint, and things were disappearing into the mouths of the city. There was even some nervous tittering from a TV anchor about them not having jobs if no one had televisions to watch.

"Yours didn't have a mouth, did it? When you left?"

Jackson stretched. "No, but I think I'll go home just the same. I have some donations I can think of right in my basement. It's like they've been waiting down there, I never use them, but today I can let them go."

Etta smiled and stretched herself. "Well I'll see you in two days, then. Promise me you'll drive safe, maniac." It was the same thing Etta said to Jackson every Tuesday, but this time they went back and stood in the doorway, walking there calmly and silently. They stood and watched.

I Love You Guys

Being the one who is left, abandoned, made lone, is worse than doing the leaving. Which is a truism, yes? Which is something  we know, and with certainty. The perpetual need to re-learn basic lessons is baffling, though. One would think that one might get to the point when one says "Ah yes! I feel prematurely bereft, because I'm anticipating the absence of my friend/lover/family member/anyone else, and this is the part when I'm to begin shopping for pity party favors (pity party favors: to-go packs of extra thick tissues for crying, mixes of music that remind you of the soon-to-be-gone person's ring tone, giant box of Animal Crackers, fresh can of whipped cream to put on Animal Crackers, box of wine.) It would be more efficient, at least: one could just proceed with the Festivus of Poivre Moi and skip that startled feeling that denotes your sense of total unpreparedness. What? you think. Sure, I've felt this way before, but that was years ago, and it was when I broke up with That Fucker What Stole My Personalized Cue Stick, and it was before I knew He/She stole it! That was completely different!...and it is completely different.

This time, you just sit there and remind each other how awesome things were when you met, even though neither of you can really recall the details. Just "I remember your haircut! You wore it that way for seven years! I thought your hair only did the one style and refused to grow on principle!"... and "There was a house party. Was it at Sherla's? No, she was with Derrick at the time- that was before she flipped the coin... Yeah, she was with Suze for a while there- they almost bought the studio in ORLANDO, which I thought was just strange since she was a CPA and she was a genius with other people's money...OK, so the party was at Ki Ki's then. Ki Ki. Come on, Ki Ki! Sorry: Ferdie. Freddy. Gerdie? What was her name, and didn't she have the operation yet?...no that was Kidzie. Yeah, the nurse/"nurse", and I can't figure that out because you'd think after all day jogging after stretchers and listening to baby doctors tell you how it is, the last thing you'd want to do is slide on your five-inch heels...Good point, maybe that's exactly what you want to do... Anyway, anyway- party, party... Right, but now I'm not sure it was in someone's house. We went to that warehouse- it was a warehouse, and that was our first rave, remember? It was so small, there were twenty people there- we were so lucky, weren't we? There was only those half-tabs of X- oh, remember X?- so we didn't experience the nervous system shutdown the five others did. Maybe it was thirty people. So it must have been more like seven other people just spent fifteen minutes falling down, one limb at a time, and we had to drag them over to the pit that was in the corner of that warehouse- it was little, and we'd put our coats down and dragged them each into the pit and layed them on the coats...are you sure? That was a show we saw? Well shit!...Was your brother in that show?" and "I love you, and it might be in a gay way."

Then it's almost time. Then it's time. Then they leave.

So it's different because your anger is fruitless, whereas the anger you have toward some dumb ex is full of delicious fruit that is satisfying. You get angry with the timing and the taxi driver and the spouse they're going home to and the fulfilling job they have that requires they do this horrible thing to you. There you are, holding the Phone of Friendship which is sounding with the Busy Signal of Bereftness, which you can't just hang up because the Cradle of Resignation is under all of the laundry that you ignored while your friend was in town. You put the phone down, still beeping, on the Get On With It Table of daily tasks; the signal is like tinnitus, barely audible and constant. So you do what anyone, what everyone, does: you turn on the Telling Television to watch a Show of Cosmic Self-Anaesthetising...and your writing becomes god-awful.

The loneliness of losing a friend this way, in a way that's no really losing them, is humbling: if this were high school again, you would be the hanger-on, the apprentice pariah, the stag at the Prom, and your friend would be their splendid, magnanimous, quietly talented self with all of the friends. Among their friends are the school assholes who transmorgify into smiling, approachable humans when they're in line or at a party with them; the nerds, who together form a phalanx of the smitten; every teacher in the school, and every administrator; the Maintenance Engineers, who laugh with them about the formality of their titles ("what's wrong with being called a janitor? It's ridiculous!"); and you. They like you almost as much as you like them, which is a miracle. And, despite what many insipid movies would have you believe about your natural thirst for status and equal amounts of adoration from all and sundry, you are just fine with it. What difference does all this make, anyway? You are friends, and because of it, you are lucky.

Dollars of the Soul

My husband and I went out for Chinese years ago, and one of us got a fortune that said: If Cheap Things Have No Value, Valuable Things Are Not Cheap? I took it home and hung it on our fridge by one end, pinned under a Power Puff Girls magnet. I loved it for many reasons- I take delight in weird syntax, from a translation or locally sourced, because it's just like watching English change in the moonlight- but most of all because it practically spelled out the continuation. If you read it aloud you can't help saying "I mean, help me out here" at the end.

I've been trying to put a mental frame around that fortune for years. Until recently, I've been thinking about it in metaphysical terms: Indeed, I ask myself, if cheap things- cheap to me, cheap to my community of artists or friends or barely tolerated bus co-habitants, cheap to the Universal We- if cheap things have no value (and here I pause to pre-emptively congratulate myself on my huge, huge intellect,) are valuable things not cheap? Since I was thinking in the abstract and mainly silly Plane of the Important Ponderings, I would try to come up with the cheap things in question: to me, spitefulness; to the immediate community, self-medication with celebrity baby-bumps and pancreas-busting amounts of sugar; We, the ability to forget all about the man behind the curtain without even being asked...Then what would the valuable, potentially not-cheap things be? Me, self-acceptance, immediate community, a bucket-passing fire brigade; We...uh...an imagination big enough to dream up childhood vaccinations?...What was the question again?

If cheap things have no value, valuable things are not cheap? We are about to move to a different continent, and so there are a million things (about 998,210 more than I thought we had) in our house that need to be sold. And now I realize what it really meant: clearly the person who wrote it was also trying to sell everything they owned, and lacking a creditable means to comparison shop, they went to work and wrote it in cookie-fortune form in the hope that if enough of those cookies went out and were read by compassionate diners, a few of them might hunt him down to help him price the Ikea cabinet. I mean, it was their top-of-the-line when he bought it three years ago but now is missing a widget and has no badly-translated instructions to go with it- what is that worth? Craig's list is the only place where people who really need furniture and have bitty budgets go for the self-torture of shopping used and online- and Craig's list is unreliable. Ikea cabinets look exactly the same in every  picture. They are described with very different adjectives. You see a lot of "brand new" and "still in good shape" and "okay" and "worked great for us for fifteen years" in the descriptions, and you'll see many prices that don't really match up with your unrealistic pricing-hopes, even though you got real with yourself while drunk on lite beer and knee-deep in receipts from a cobbler's bill that you put on the MasterCard that you closed out seven years ago, and the pictures of these Ikea Kaarlupvstoorgaart cabinets are identical.

I believe the trick is to do it piece-by-piece, which is hell on your TV time. Who wants to be sticking price tapes on your broken two-legged tripods (Still works! $38 30 24 15 3!) when you could be watching anything at all in marathon form, courtesy of Netflix's library of unasked-for Friday night network sitcoms from the 90's? No one, that's who. Escape is not an option, though; not even stupid escape. So one must wade in, and one must find out which are the not inexpensive valuable things and which are the cheap cheap things through one's intuition. Which is a nice way of saying desperation.

Broken futon frame? Since it's not just broken, it's busted up- I will sell this as firewood. I may be able to get a cord of large-sized kindling out of it (for those not raised on a farm, a "cord" of wood is a smallish pile. The determination of what constitutes a smallish pile is reserved entirely for career farmers who will look into the distance, take a pull on their PBR, and declare one smallish pile a cord and a twin smallish pile right next to it "a little light." It's just what they do.) There are area rugs- and what area rugs they are, with their thin spots from the household pet's lovin' spot (love to the rug, not to each other- you degenerate,) and their spill-free corners...these I shall price at $150 each, and I may just get away with that price because I plan to sell it to my daughter's friends by telling them brilliant adventures that may happen to them if they have the things in their bedroom. Then I'll sit back and let the calls from their parents overwhelm my voicemail...Or $50 for two. It depends on which plan is less work... For the table with the heap of my daughter's various artworks that she doesn't want to pack up and take- the table is $.25 (three-year-old Ikea particle board is basically table-shaped dust,) the artwork ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Does that sound high to you? I can't tell, because it is both valuable and cheap. So, yeah, a cool million, payable in cash or monopoly money, whichever is the better offer.

What I'd like to do is have an open house, letting friends and family and friends of friends come and wander around the place for a while, sipping on the delightful adult beverage that will be served to them by my child in a clean white tuxedo shirt, and then have an auction on the entire thing. One lot, folks, and a great deal may be had with the bid of just $1000, think of all the be-yoo-tiful furniture from Sweden yours in your own home and the vases that came with the bouquets from 1800flowers and the Blackberry phone only five years old and the other Blackberry folks, that's right two Blackberries with their chargers and these five Trader Joe's shopping bags full of alkaline batteries, you'll never go batteryless again simply go to your bag and start licking the nipple-like tops to find the ones with charge left in them and there are these ugly-ass heirlooms that have no use but were kept to avoid guilt- do I hear $1000? A great deal here folks you don't want to hesitate do I hear $800? Come on now you will not find a better array of random house furnishings for $750, $700 do I hear $700 let's get this thing going for $500, $500 is a steal for these plastic toy-bases, and you can spend be-yoo-tiful family time with your spouse and your children trying to figure out which base goes with which broken toy, better than any picture puzzle- Can I get a bid of $400?...

It will be all right. I will be in the back, pacing while my brother-in-law mixes stronger and stronger drinks in the vain hope that someone will get drunk enough to pipe in with "I'll take everything for $15,000! Woo!" and then pass out, arm up, hand holding out an envelope full of fifties. And sure, even though that won't happen, it's nice to imagine it all being done and wrapped up in a little Britain-bound bow. It's more than nice- it's invaluable.

School, and the U.K.

Schools are like women: they are fickle; they will make you wait and wait; they will sleep with all of your friends starting the fucking second you leave town to go to Boise on business for three days, the slag. ("Slag" is British for "Slut" and "Hag" combined, except when followed by a prepositional phrase. I'm assuming. I've never actually heard that term used by anyone British, but you read a few pamphlets and watch a few episodes of MI-5 and you're willing to say anything that smacks of United Kingdomness, even if it has no basis in their actual linguistic practices. It's jimmy-sine gobsquattle, what what!)

So: Schools. I'm looking at some. They seem, without exception, fabulous. Each of them is housed in their own historical manses and abbeys and they each have their own wood, which is Brit for "forest." So, to repeat, each school in Great Britain comes with its' own forest. Many of the academies that I've been googling have their own Ents,who operate the canteens during 8th-year Girls' Rugby home games. Also these schools have a pool, as a matter of course. Some of the less-fortunate village elementary schools have to share the heated outdoor swimming pool with the village darts club, but each school I've looked at so far has listed a pool amongst its' facilities, much the same way one of ours might enthusiastically list girls-and-boys toilets. Their libraries are imperial, and if I were casting someone to stand in one of these libraries for, say, a fifteen-second public service segment on the telly, I would  cast no none less than Dame Dench to stand there. I might have her read something aloud for that fifteen seconds, and no matter what outmoded reference book about mid-nineteenth century tulip bulb technology she'd be reading aloud and no matter what reform school's holding cell/cafeteria she were standing in, it would be classy beyond any American measure. The reform school libraries here have armchairs. Because when you are reading, you need armchairs. The Brits know this, and provide.

Also their applications are relatively benign, with simple questions and easily-translatable initialised abbreviations and forward-thinking lines to fill out that actually match the questions... Getting to said applications is proving to be not as civilised. There are a great many cross-referencing web pages and almost inaccessible links that lead to completely inaccessible other links, as is only proper on any government-run website. I got on a page that told me to begin an application by putting in a birthday (not necessarily my child's) which then told me I had to log in, so I logged in and it told me in order to create a log-innable account I had to begin an application. All of that brings about a warm glow, much like the glow of an abuse victim who's found that new, special, abusive someone. Oh, you think. Look, they wrote some enraging code right into the program so that I could spend hours trying to trick the website into letting its' guard down and taking me to one of its' mysterious links. How sweet! Those British people are so polite they thought of all the aggravations of home. I didn't even have to ask.

And so these schools are like women. No, wait- I mean men. Boys. They are like boys at camp on Sadie Hawkins day, before the dance, when it was the girls' humiliating job to find dates by outrunning a boy- at first it's the Populars, those who's hair has been bleached in the sun by all the volleyball playing and joshing around with other boys in a completely non-sexual way, then it's the future Counsellors, made so by their reflexive naming of plants they pass during their walks to the Mess, then someone's brother, then the quiet freaky guys who only burn and peel and refuse to talk to anyone- and then tackling him like he's in the midst of stealing Gemmy's antique brooch and they the only one who can stop him. The schools dodge and weave and sometimes let you get close, but not get them. The bastards.

Who made that up, anyway? Who thought it would be good fun for us to desperately sprint around the football field until someone took pity on you and let you get their sleeve? I don't know who did, but I know this: it wasn't the British. Or if it was, they would have the decency to hide the smirking behind a book in one of their red-velvet and stained-glass libraries.