Fugue #111

There is a gulf between unrequited first loves and requited ones. It’s the gulf between dreaming and experiencing. And it’s easier to wake up than forget.

It’s late, they stand on her back patio - the paving blocks their dance floor. She leans against the house, he paces a bit, they talk in hushed voices. (This isn’t the first time they’ve done this.) Intimate voices, voices of two people who know each other so well in so many ways, but don’t know each other in the one way they both want to.

Gene asks Emily a question - it’s not important, something random, like if she wants to hang out after school tomorrow, or what they’re doing on Friday (if they’re doing something on Friday). She smiles, coy, leans toward him with an answer to a question he didn’t ask - something mysterious, barely audible. They’re closer now: her face in front of his, her wide eyes close slowly, and her full lips close just as slowly. He never heard her, and it doesn’t matter, and they fall into it.

Gene smiles when they kiss. When, as in while, during. Emily doesn’t seem to mind.

Fugue #110

In this dress she sees her mother and grandmother. It’s timeless.

It’s 1942 and her grandmother is nervous - about marrying, but more about marrying a solider leaving for Pearl Harbor in a week. She wasn’t cut out for this. Her smiles are forced, her fears are visible, even as she glides through the silken blur of her most beautiful day.

It’s 1965 and her mother isn’t nervous at all - except the heat, and the frosting of the cake in the banquet hall. She was made for this, being a bride. Her smiles are on cue, insincerity so real it masks anything approximating emotion in the entire wedding party.

Ana knows the pictures well. She has studied them for years. The albums were in the drawers of the living room table. She holds the dress up in front of her, looks in the mirror, and tilts her head to the right. She decides to put it on.

- Hey...
- Hey! Ever heard of knocking?!
- What’s that dress?
- It’s the dress that my mom and my grandma wore at their weddings.
- Why–
- Paul.
- Ok, I’m leaving. You look pretty, Ana.
- Thanks. (points to the door)
- Going...

Fugue #109

In 1929, sociologist Robert Lloyd theorized that Middle America towns were becoming caught in a web of consumerism, which threatened to strip away their traditional values.

That was 80 years ago. And now we have the World Wide Web to finish the job, obliterating with finality any distinction between communities of mutual interest and communities of mutual location. These towns are not just losing their values, they’re losing their very identities. They’re disintegrating, figuratively and literally - the ties that bind us together in this place, as well as the place itself.

We used to know each other, to care about each other. Think about your mother and Miss Mitchell and their Holly Hobby cup. Sugar, flour, milk for coffee, even cigs. And your little legs to shuttle it back and forth down the street. Now Miss Mitchell is gone, and the white paint and sharp corners of her house are now dull. The people who live there now park their cars on the front lawn.

Homes are rotting into the ground, concrete sidewalks are becoming impassible, buckled by tree roots and cracked by weeds. The streets are mostly quiet. And the school playgrounds, too - jungle gyms rusting, sheet metal slides hammered by rain, and dodgeball circles fading under the sun.

"I don’t remember it this way, I remember everything new, newer anyway." Paul grabs the tetherball pole.

Fugue #108

- Is that why you do it, Zed? Because I can tell you, happiness is always closer than wealth.
- I’m not sure. I’m not like this, I’m not. You know me well enough to know that. It’s just...it’s confusing. Everything is happening so fast.

Marbell is wearing his disappointed face, and he’s overplaying it by half. His response is like an essay.

- Listen...we’ve gotten older, Zed. But not yet wiser for our mistakes. Instead of learning, we’ve opted to relearn, to relive moments, to remember. With ‘what if’ as a mantra, and sometime, almost convincingly, even ‘why not.’ We’re sheepish and embarrassed, knowing that what has happened - if it didn’t happen for a reason - happened because of choices that we made...which, for better or worse, brought us here today. And we can’t do it all over again.
- I know . But think of this. We’re not locked in. We’re not bound to any one view of the past. It’s not singular, it’s plural. Because the past only exists in the in minds of those of us in the present - and in interpretations WE give it - it is never too late to do something about the past.
- That’s John Barth. You’re cribbing Barth from The End of the Road. Ha, you never change, do you?

Fugue #107

Ana, headphones on, laying on the couch, staring out the front window at the school across the street. A cat on her belly. She puts her palm on his face, covering his eyes, pauses, and pulls it back over his ears - he ducks under - and down his back. And over again, until he purrs.

She hums a song, light and lilty and stop-starty - her voice, like dancing air: fresh and sweet; fine, but not thin.

The afternoon sun cuts through the window and leaves a parallelogram on the floor. It highlights dust specks. Some rising, an illusion, all eventually falling. Sun. Light. Flaubert.

"It’s not that bad," she whispers to the cat, "Only a midterm." He blinks at her, eyes heavy. She holds him for a few more minutes, then squeezes him, puts her forehead on his and kisses him between the eyes. She pushes him gently to the floor, where he’s grateful to find the sun. She gets up, and walks over to the stereo.

He used to be one of the Rotten Ones, she thinks, picking up a cd case. And she liked him for that. But when he joined the Groovy Mice, she loved him. She smiles at the picture. 2-3-4!

Fugue #106

She laughs with her mouth open. It’s endearing. And the look on her face - chin down, raised brows, sly smile - is more than that. You’re very grateful.

Pause.

Harold Pinter.

Not long, not heavy, not psychological. Just enough - a beat - to think about what you said or will say. Or what she said. Typically, less than ten seconds.

"What were we even talking about?" she says, "Oh, yeah..."

We go from silence to chatter, and the chatter might as well be silence. We were, we are, talking about nothing. And it drowns out everything else we should say. Do you think about me? Do you know how I feel? Do you feel the same way? Do you? I’m naked here, I’m laid bare, look look. I wonder if she has the same questions.

I clear my throat, she stops. I say, "Keep talking."

She’s better than you at everything - except love. And you both know it.

Fugue #105

I always expected river banks to ease into the water, to slope gradually down toward an actual shore. But that’s not the nature of rivers. Oceans and lakes, and big rivers like the Mississippi, sure - they lap at the sand and the dirt. And their shores or banks are a transition, where their wide and dispersed strength recedes and cedes its influence to the land.

Rivers, these little ones, cut and gash their way through the prairie...hollowing out, leaving jagged edges - tumbling crumbling edges - that wash away, pebble and grain, to pile on each other further downstream. They tell a story, these kind of river banks. The layers of the exposed land are our history.

This layer? This is when the Sioux came here. And this one? This is when they were pushed away and placed on the reservations.

It will always be a confusing story, like so much of our elusive past. As much a testament to the erosive power of time, of eventuality, as it is to the futility of standing up to it.

Fugue #104

Her exterior is just too tough. And you imagine days before, days when it wasn't. Like the day of her first breakup, or her high school graduation. Her wedding, or the day her children were born. The day her parents died. All those days - their smiles and their tears - they aren't there for you. You can imagine them, but that’s as close as you get. What you get from her is something else. A facade, what she lets you see. It’s not much.

She earned her memories, you didn’t. You weren’t there. As hard as it is to believe, she cried, a lot. She had to. She smiled, she beamed with pride. She had to. Pain and healing, and you weren’t involved in either one. You think you can meet on even ground. You think you can know - you want to, you want to fake it and say I understand. But you don’t, you can’t, not really. At this point, you’re just a spectator.

"It's like, there was an us before there was a me. When you left, I had to learn to be me."

Pause.

"And I did. And it was really hard, Gene. Really and truly."

It’s inconceivable, you think.

Fugue #103

The band director had visions. Visions of awards, plaques, medals, and trophies. And appearances in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Rose Bowl Parade. Even visions of magazine articles written about him and his reinvention of what a post-millenial marching band repertoire should look/sound like, framed and mounted outside the band room in the hallway for everyone to see/read.

All summer he had worked on an arrangement of Brian Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets." First, the big brass - trombones and tubas - takes the melody, low and slow and steady. And after a chorus (no, two), in come the middle reeds - oboes, clarinets, saxes - echoing the bottom, giving the melody body. Then percussion - drums in poly-rhythm. The tempo picks up, and then. Then the top - xylophone and flute - to add filigree.

The band loved it, once they learned it. But the poms director didn’t. They talked. It was cordial at first: She said the new song was "great...and really interesting," but that it would be difficult to choreograph a halftime routine for it. But not impossible, right? No, not impossible, but very very difficult. He shrugged off her concerns, and she pressed for a change. As she pressed more, he shrugged more. And it all came to a head in the hall between fourth and fifth periods. She called him a "snob" and a "nerd." He called her an "ignorant bitch." So she went to the principal.

Fugue #102

He hands her the envelope, and she opens it - her still thin, still painted dark, now maternal fingers are familiar to him. She unfolds it and reads it.

At the end, where she had stopped writing, Gene started:

Em, I hope you won’t read this note again. If you do, it means that I’m not around to tell you this myself, but I still want you to know. I love you. I always did, even when I left. And I’m sorry.
- G

"Oh, Paulie..."

As she hands him the note, her eyes fill with tears that don’t fall. These are old tears, saved and nurtured for years, and she is too protective to let them fall into her lap.

"...you should read that. Not now, sometime - when I’m not here."

She smiles, it’s fake. And the tears finally stream down her cheeks, to her chin, down her neck. It’s a warm Saturday afternoon - late summer, early fall.

Paul leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and holds the letter between them, looking at the porch floor.

- Do you miss him, Em?
- Of course, I do. But he’s not here.
- No, he’s not.
- And we are.

Yep.