"Starting a New Hobby"

(1998---Ellsbeth speaks)

On the day my father is scheduled to die, my mother drives him to the hospital.

I wait at home, in the basement. Geraldine, from Shangri-La, down the road, lets herself in. She surveys my mess, picks up scattered bows and wrapping paper, tape, scissors,wrenches, hammers, puts them in piles.

I stop her, saying, "You can’t do this without supervision! You don’t know where things go!"

Geraldine shakes her hands in helpless agitation.

"We can’t clean now," I say, "my mother is due home from my father’s death."

Geraldine stands at the dryer folding laundry, as if it were any other day. But aching inertia puddles in my bones, making my hands, feet, belly and heart too heavy to budge.

A blue car turns into the driveway. "Here's my mother now," I say, and coming unstuck, I walk out through racks of photo-developing equipment. Geraldine follows. My father, on the night before his death, must have stayed up late preparing these. "These are for me," I tell Geraldine smugly. She looks puzzled. Worried.

I hurry to meet my mother, who comes in through the basement. My father comes in behind her. I inhale sharply, surprised. I study his profile and his flared nostrils, recognize him from the way he would look in his casket: dark, pockmarked, emaciated.

He frowns at Geraldine, hisses in the cracked voice of my estranged husband, she’s smelly, obese, retarded. Because I thought my father and his judgements would be gone by now, I don’t make Geraldine leave. But I'm afraid to defend her, he looks so fierce.

The photo equipment is not for me, but for my father, who is starting a new hobby. He packs his supplies and accessories. I accompany him, swarthy and silent, to catch a bus headed for the city. The bus is made of couches on wheels tied together, each jammed with people. I climb onto a trundle seat that comes out from under my father's seat to the side like a motorcycle sidecar.

Geraldine waves and waves as we drive off, still waving until she's a speck on the far horizon. A huge emptiness swallows her up. When we get to the city, my father gets off, walks away, and doesn't look back. I try to take his seat, but my hips are too wide to fit between the passengers.
They scowl, grumble and shove over to make room for me.

(Mary Stebbins Taitt---------- 080301)

"How Uncle Jake was First to Fly the Transatlantic"

(Driving Aldy and Geraldine to the Pediatrician, 1969)

This buggy can fly! England, you say? France? Where's that doctor at, Gerry? Aldy? Do you know?

Look at her purr through the clouds--- mushrooms and magic separate the skyway into shimmering layers, dancing through each other---kelp in the tide, ribbons in a breeze, living
strands of DNA unwinding across itself---sticky---

The shining keeps slipping. Here, hold the wheel for me, Geradine!

Simultaneously I want to be more me and more "not-me." If more me is more not-me, why, when I try to speak clearly, do these words and not-words disintegrate into such gibberish?

"You don't understand me? Come along. Watch the "me"'-selves and the "not-me"'-selves split and crawl along their various skyways. The Not-me's chant---"Don't go so slowly! Someone might notice! We'll fly!" Burn up the sky, Geraldine! Don't worry sweetie---

WHUMP! Whazzat? Out here in the ether, I watch the body police attempting to reassemble
the Not-me's back into something they recognize. Some of the me's-or-not-me keel over, laughing.

"Pretty funny, isn't it Gerry? Even Aldy agrees. Listen to him chortle! Just not that big. The rest of us Me's notice the texture of the bark on this tree that holds this cumpled car, the dark
spaces inhabiting the light, the gaps between the policeman's teeth. We flow through his clenched fist like honey--sweet, sweet on some laughing, layered tongue. That's one rough runway, crew!"

--------------------(a story newly penned by Mary Taitt)

"The Project"

How Ethel and Geraldine Made Caskets for their Memories

Arts and Crafts, 1990

Bright bits of paper... hot pink and red, dayglo blue. Magazine pages with pictures, large and small. Shreds of ribbon. Flowers, torn from napkins. Beads... and plastic jewels: Geraldine and Ethel make memory boxes for each other.

Geraldine cuts out pictures of chickens. She slices off one leg by accident. She puts the leg inside the box. She remembers the chicken they called "Peg." Short for Peg-leg. Peg was a good layer, even with only one leg. Mama cut the bad leg off with an axe. It was black and oozy, but Geraldine didn't want to throw it away. She wanted to fix it, and put it right back on the hen. She remembers searching the weeds for it and finally agreeing on a burial with flowers.

Ethel cuts out pictures of babies. Babies, and little girls. Girls with braids, brown hair, blue eyes. She puts them all inside the box. Buries them in beads. Blue, green and aqua. Geraldine glues beads to the outside of her box. Green and yellow, alternating.

"A tisket, a tasket, a green-and-yellow basket..." (She hums, sings, taps her foot.) "I wrote a letter to my love, and on the way I dropt it... I dropt it... I dropt it....."

When the bead string begins to look like a snake, she glues a brown plastic gemstone on for a head. Two small red beads for eyes. Then makes another. Another. Snakes intertwine and layer. She adds some rhinestones. The box begins to sparkle, like fireflies on a summer night.

"Yes, on the way I dropt it..."

Ethel plunges her hands into the gallon jars of beads. She likes the way they feel on her skin. Cool. Massaging and skin delicious. "Try this," she says to Geraldine. Beads pour from one hand to another. They flow like water. But dry and nubbly. Geraldine remembers swimming, sleeping, stretching. She remembers Ricky. (Again.)

Geraldine cuts out a frog, strokes its back with a fingertip. Drops it not in her box, but in her apron pocket. Ethel unburies the paper babies, then covers them with beads again. She pours the beads out and in on top of the babies, again and again. Geraldine paints her name in red on the bottom of her box. Ethel paints her box black. Then they trade boxes and unpack the images. Black paint sticks to Geraldine's fingers. Down through blue beads she digs to find a pile of babies and little girls in pigtails. She cradles them in her hands, humming a lullaby and crooning. She sways from side to side in her white plastic chair.

Ethel cuts out eggs to go with the chickens in her box from Geraldine. She finds an axe and puts that in too. When the counselor comes round and asks for a story, Geraldine says:

"Once upon a time there was a little girl. She laid in the bottom of the lake with water over her head. Water like a blanket, only cold. A big light came. It came down though the water and the girl thought it was an angel." Ethel says:

"We had lots of chickens and they laid lots of eggs. Brown eggs, white eggs, colored eggs. When they stopped laying eggs, we cut off their heads and ate them for dinner. Even the one whose leg I cut off. We even ate the ones we loved."

"We ate the ones we loved," Geraldine repeats, rocking the babies, whose blue beads cling to their gummy black paint.

(from a story created by Mary Taitt)