Writing

The Iron Rabbit's Boy

I'm a yellow iron rabbit with bright red eyes and tall, standup ears. Many years ago my boy, I call him mine, because he found me lying on my side in a stream. He looked down at me with his gray-green eyes and he brought me home. My boy grew up and moved out West, leaving me behind on a gleaming floor in his mother's offbeat, tidy house amid her collection of  stone and cast faux animals, such as myself, but he will always be mine. 

I like my static life. You couldn't pay me all the make-believe  carrots in the world to be a human being. I've seen the roller coaster ride they call life. Watched their enduring commitment to suffering and fits of destructiveness. Take my boy's mother. She had a lot going for her when she was young, free spirited as she was, but she had this constant companion staunchly at her side who went by the name of Fear, drawing her out of bed each morning and riding the tides of her blood, imbuing her with premonition and regret. From my fixed vantage point, over the years, I've witnessed her misguided boldness, dragging  her to the edge of the abyss time and again, which is why, thank you very much, I'm not one bit sorry to be a door stop.

Take two hundred acres of hay fields, deep woods, barns, Indian paintbrush, the winding river. A low-ceiling white farm house not tidy in its corners – ice trappings like claws jeering inside the windows, snow burrowing up floorboards, wind blustering through light switches, a furnace banging and snorting to no avail. Take my boy's mother, peeling onions with her gloves on in the icy kitchen. Take his father, not often around, his ambitions too slack to outrun his demons, his mind bent, his well-built body moving in accord with ice cubes clinking into a glass. Fear whispering into the mother's ear.

My boy has a beautiful sister with hair the color of sweet white corn and eyes the color of chocolate. When she was little, she ran around in her mother's discarded lingerie, a rhinestone tiara and red high top sneakers. She was often mean to my boy, because he followed her everywhere and drove her crazy. But, in her good heart, she knew he loved her in his toddling, stumbling way. One day they raced across the hayfields, the sun fine on their faces, arms flung wide, embracing the open sky, until they came to a  stream running off the river. On the other side of it slouched a one-room abandoned cottage with a green roof and shutters. My boy and his sister often entered it to look for treasures left behind, but all they ever found were broken shards of china. That is, until my boy found me in the stream. I must have once lived in that cottage. How I ended up in the stream is a mystery. My boy dragged me by my ears across the fields, past the blue Berkshire hills undulating like prehistoric beasts along the horizon, up the winding driveway and back to the house. I weighed almost as much as he did, as he was only three years old. 

After his mother divorced my boy's father, she married another man. I felt frightened for her, my boy and his sister. You didn't have to a living creature to know that man was bad. Insentient objects feel more than you think. Stones have souls. Once, when my boy was eleven, he came home from school in a wilted state. His lips were white and cracked, his complexion waxen.  The stepfather had moved into my boy's house and acted like he owned the place. My boy was suddenly alarmed. He couldn't breathe. “Put him in a cold shower. He'll be fine. Don't baby him,” the stepfather said. It was a January twenty below zero ice storm night and his mother drove my boy to the emergency room. Just the two of them alone on the road in the raw blackness. All the way to the hospital, his mother longed for my boy's real father. They nearly slid off the road into a ditch. My boy spent hours in an oxygen tent. I may be an iron rabbit, but that night my heart fell from my chest, and shattered like a teacup into a million shards onto the gleaming floor. 

My boy, so far away now, is an exceptional man, that much I know. I also know the earth absorbs finally all things put upon it. Dust to dust, all matter cast over with hoary immortality, moss and mold, my boy and me destined to be together again. But, for now, I'll sit transfixed, my long ears pricked optimistically for any outbursts of joy. My red eyes steadfast in their devotion to witnessing little moments. To watch my boy's mother, diminished yet iron-willed, holding hands with her sidekick Fear, as she ventures forth, a practiced warrior, season after season, out into the fraught world. 

© 2013 Joan Embree

Mystery of the Stolen Panties

You had a friend, a cigarette fiend, a ceaseless trajectory from her hand to her mouth, sucking in smoke like her life depended on it, who had tried to stop you, crying, No, no, you can't do this. It will kill you. It will ruin your life, as if your life wasn't already in substantial jeopardy. Exhaling lavishly, she swept her hand across the cavernous, unoccupied hardware store near the river in a former mill town you were about to buy and turn into a restaurant: Don't do it. It's insanity, but, of course, you did, because insanity was right up your alley. Plus, it was to be your a ticket out of a marriage that wasn't so good. A husband who constantly groped you in front of his children and yours, sticking his hand up your skirt and down your pants at every turn. Once, he came home from a business trip with a black dildo. Did he think black would make you more yielding? It didn't. You never cared anything about color or substitutes. You weren't into weird sex toys and shit like that. Anyway, you once had the real deal, a full on-Jamaican experience, a glistening body builder boyfriend you adored with the title Mr. Kingston. Dreadlocks, Rasta serious big-ass spliffs, dude could waterski barefoot, if you see what I mean.

So, there you were, on the side of your new building, picking up candy wrappers and beer bottles when a simian-looking boy, small with sallow skin, appeared on the sidewalk. Need any help? How old are you? Fifteen. He looked about eight. What can you do? Anything, he said. Can you help me paint that big room in there? It's going to be the dining room, a restaurant. I want to paint the walls Geranium Red. Whatever floats your boat, babe. Don't matter to me none, he said. In addition to calling you babe, he looked a bit off, but, so what, so were you, what with the menacing husband breathing down your neck, so you hired him. His name was Elmo Pachi. He lived sometimes in his mother's basement, sometimes out on the street. You said he could live upstairs in an unfinished apartment.

One night you had a dream so strange it seemed not to belong to you, some mischief surely having escaped the confines of somebody else's brain, breaking through the ceiling of their bedroom, flying up into the night in its inexorable dream fashion, its supreme, swift vision penetrating your roof, saying to itself, oh, look down there! That's a perfect head to fuck with, and so osmotically slipped into the semi-permeable membrane of your skull, casting you onto the tv set of Julia Child's kitchen. Julia thrilling, scraping a roast chicken up off the floor, Oh, dear, and this time again I don't have on any panties, she trilled, startling you awake, reminding you of the stolen panties being snatched from clothes lines in the little backyards all around your restaurant -to -be. Front page headlines read: Neighbors Turn on One Another Demanding Return of Panties, K-Mart Inventory of Panties Low, Woman Arrested for Setting Underwater Beaver Traps Under Clothes Line. The whole town buzzing and unnerved.

Elmo worked hard, moving like a monkey, shinning up poles, scrambling along top shelving, then focusing on painting with careful, broad strokes He had a special bond with his mother, who came by everyday to give him a nickel bag. You pretended not to notice. What did you care. You needed him.  One day he said, Here. Take a hit. No thanks, haven't done that in years. Come on, babe, It'll be good for you. You'll work better. You ended up sitting on the floor, next to the service bar, paralyzed and painting the same small patch for five straight hours. He was up by the celling. How you doing down there, babe? Ha, Ha, Ha. Still, he was great until you discovered cases of beer and wine missing. Your brother, your partner, caught him passing a case out the cellar window and that was that.

He left behind a bag of laundry. Poor thing. The least you could do was take it home and wash it. You didn't notice what you dumped into the washing machine, but the first thing you pulled out to put in the dryer was a pair of pink lace panties. Then lavender satin ones, then a pair with polka dots, then old lady bloomers, some thongs, hundreds of panties of every conceivable size and style. Jesus. You knew he had deformities because his mother had snorted coke when she was pregnant. He confided this to you, as well as his strange way of peeing, something to do with his penis, or maybe no penis at all, you weren't sure, because your mind had clicked shut like a door. You didn't want to know. Your first thought was he probably had a fetish for women's underwear, then a light bulb went off, Oh, shit, he's the infamous, mysterious panty thief. You were obligated to call the police. But, wait, no, how would you explain washing stolen goods. Didn't that make you an accomplice? Could you be arrested ? Jesus Christ. You took the panties out of the dryer, trying not to feel contaminated as you put them back into the laundry bag, which you considered planting in the trunk of your husband's car, but instead tossed into a Good Will bin.

Time passed. The Restaurant flourished. You got a divorce. You heard Elmo was down living “in the islands.” You know that's code for dealing, right? But who are you to talk, with your own defects and misdemeanors. You never ratted him out, knowing he didn't stand much of a chance in life. Any way, when you thought about it, what was the big deal in copping panties, compared to bombs dropped, the President on TV sneering “read my lips,” dogs chained up, cats tortured, children molested, not to mention birds kept alone in cages for their whole sad lives. Besides, keeping Elmo's secret gave you a perverse joy, your heart made glad by the image of him basking peacefully and happily stoned in the sun, a just and fair outcome in your opinion.

© 2013 Joan Embree

Lipstick 

(Or, This Is How You Say What You Mean in One Sentence)

Whenever a man shows up at your house, no easy feat because of the fencing and gates, you're braless, hair in two ratty braids, your at-home look, like now, the UPS truck careening to a halt, the loud shhhrump of the driver's door slammed open, setting the dogs off,  you run down coatless to help with the gates, the man in the known brown uniform, (as an aside, don't you love the shorts they wear in the summer?), searching frantically, Don't know, ma'am where your package is, but it's not in here, and you climb up to help, your breaths cotton candy merging in the freezing air, he's heaving boxes, you're on the verge of hypothermia, but yoga pays off, as you lunge and split along the shelving, finding the package under a mountain of boxes, and perhaps embarrassed, he says, I'm not a morning person, but you don't say, dude, it's noontime, because he's a lovely guy, you're  having fun, plus he gallantly lugs the package up your long ice- rutted driveway, dogs going wild, considering they go with you everywhere and to bed, Cassidy's majestic snout on your hip, his tall stand -up ears like shadow puppets on the wall in the night, Mary Alice  against your back, Allie  at your feet, no man in the house, another reason you look like a bastard out of Carolina, not giving a shit, except when you go out it's another story, you caring desperately how you look, being your mother's daughter, she in intensive care, post stroke, tubes coming out everywhere, demanding someone go to the house and get her lipstick, and then, finally dead, your princely brother paying homage to her pride, throwing a fit the mortician forgot her clunky turquoise and gold jewelry  for the wake, a truly bizarre ritual in your opinion, but that's just you, running around like an over- the -hill Pippi Longstickings gone wrong, but never mind, it's only when a man pops in, you realize it's brazen, in bad taste, unattractive, this no bra, pigtail business, and the sad thing was it was a bone-chilling January, winds wailing, your mother's funeral down there in Peekskill, a woman with a hidden past seeping like blood through your childhood, secrets as dark and deep as The Congo, at her vanity table, you a child in the doorway, her legs in nylons the color of winter weeds, garter belt, black triangle at her crotch, breasts not yet trapped in a bra, nipples like suction cups, areolae like smeared bruises, you're thinking this is a key to your discomfort with underwear, the ground so frozen her coffin  stacked on top of other coffins until they could bring in heavy equipment, and anyway you can't breathe in a bra, (you're not a natural breather, your first yoga teacher, a Persian martinet cranky as a chipped tooth yelling at you for never breathing), and back in the house, the dogs happy to see you, NPR coverage of the epic poaching frenzy in Garamba, funneling you back to riding the night train to Mombassa, entombed at twilight in a first-class sleeper, on your back on the berth, your last ex- husband performing business-like oral sex, as you stared out the window into the eyes of lions at the edge of the bush, the rushing past of African men, their beautiful, high-cheekbone faces sullen in the heat, and you longed to be out there with them and not where you were, and now Murray, your beloved cat, slinking like silk around your ankles and you mourn for wild animals evermore decimated, elephants slaughtered, weeping over one another's carnage, anguished trumpeting, calves grieving their murdered mothers, the sawing, the incessant sawing, tusks falling, unconscious men at their worst, Chinese lust for ivory, evilness ascendant, and where, don't we wonder, is God? Witnessing the whole of creation She/He has wrought, remembering all at once mankind's ceaseless atrocities? Grief- driven once again into hiding, curled fetal, His/Her face turned to the wall? 

© 2013 Joan Embree

My Brother Jay

Eulogy Given at Simon's Rock College, Nov. 2009

What is it the wind wants? Rattling the window panes, guiding ghosts along?  Dead leaves scuttling sideways like crabs across the gale-swept lawn. Redemption? Forgiveness? Remembrances of things gone by? Jay and I as little kids wrestling in loud, plummeting sessions on the blue tweed couch, messing up the doilies. Me hurling him to the floor, his blood curdling screams sending our mother in the throes of housecleaning, a blue bandana wrapped around her head, racing into the room like Aunt Jemima gone wrong. Our father pulling us in a red wagon up a steep hill to Depew Park where ducks, geese and swans swam, dipped and freely beat their wings, except for the ones trapped in a cage. “That's a goddamn sad sight if I ever saw one. Nobody should be locked up like that. Especially birds. It's goddam shame,” he would say, his black as coal eyes slit above an ever-present Lucky Strike. 

In the winter ice skating on the pond, Jay with amazing grace, gliding in blindingly fast circles and spinning on one foot like Sonia Henny. The two of us becoming Indian blood brothers on a weekly basis, using a razor blade to slice our thumbs which we pressed to one another's so that our blood mingled as we sat on the grass staring meaningfully into one another's eyes until one of us had to blink.

Memories on the wings of wind. Supper time in our house a fraught affair. Our mother torturing us with calves liver, brussels sprouts, peas and carrots cooked to death, which we shoved in a napkin, and when she'd get up to get dessert, one of us running to flush the food down the toilet. Or, heaving it out dining room window behind our father who sat oblivious behind the evening paper, or so we thought, until he'd peek over the paper and wink at us. Our mother returning with a bowl of canned fruit cocktail incarcerated in a jiggly lime green jello mold topped with marshmallow fluff. Jay widening his eyes in horror and pretending to throw up behind her back.

Music in our house. Our father playing the harmonica like an ascending train, like it was part of his anatomy.  Jay on the piano as good as Cole Porter or Bobby Short. Erroll Garner, the King and I, South Pacific, West Side Story spinning on the victrola. Our aunt taking us on the train into the City to see the original Peter Pan with Mary Martin, thrilling the audience as she flew right over us, a hushed silence of awe until Jay shouted at the top of his little lungs: “HEY, WHAT ARE ALL THOSE STRINGS?”

Before he could no longer walk, my brother could dance. He had rhythm. He had soul. The boy could dance. I'd be so proud to show him off to the college friends I brought home, dragging him out of his room, demanding that he'd instantly be funny, putting him on the spot, but he never failed. Cracking them up with some rendition of Tullulah Bankhead, Dick Van Dyke or Imogene Coca. My brother could knock you out with his Dorothy Parker piercing wit. His Jack Benny deadpan that said it all. The way he'd look attentively,kindly, into your eyes and make you feel you were the only person who mattered in all the world. When he and I ran Embree's Restaurant, I don't believe it was so much my food that made it popular, but rather Jay's charm, warmth and bonhomie. Once, when we went out to dinner, I was despondent because I had just turned 58. “Darling, he said, his eyebrow arched,“for God's sake,  you're 56,” turning to the friend next to him and saying “she never was very good at math.” 

Wind  knocking against the house, seeking to know when, how, at what moments, things began to turn. Dark forces confounding, conspiring to make us lost to one another. My brother lost to Isabelle and Blair, my children, his grandnephew, Justin, but we heard always of his love for this place, Simon's Rock, how dearly he loved you, the students, who knew of his goodness.  I know you are grieving his passing and the loss of all that he gave you, but know that your friendship with him was one of reciprocity. With you, he was the person he most wanted to be, the brother I used to know and love, the precious boy of long ago. You gave his life meaning, for how else could he possibly have gotten up each morning, riddled with pain, unable to walk. How did he drive his car here without sensation in his legs? Quite simply, he did so because he needed to be here. Because you became his beloved family. For that I am grateful to you and for that I am envious. 

After our father died, a raven flew in the sky above the dogs and me, as we ran through the woods. He followed us for the longest time until I realized he was my father. When Blair's tender and perfect dog, Jack, died this past summer, he came to us as a great blue heron, alighting on a branch above a lake. Perhaps, in the Spring, I'll be in my garden and Jay will appear as a Blue Jay. “So, how do you like this getup, babe?” he'll say, his wry timing intact and I'll know that having cast off his diminished and suffering body, death will have restored his purity, rendering him blithe and free. His heart forever enveloped in the blue mist of our Berkshire hills. His exquisite soul caressed and carried for all eternity in the merciful grace of the wind.  

© 2013 Joan Embree

Eulogy for Michael Gizzi, who died 

September 30, 2010 

   Read at The Lenox Book Store

“Avis even birdsong Don't communicate all what concerns a bird and don't forget, Avis, you was a lizard once.” Hey, Joanie Baloney, I need two chicken schnitzel and I need 'em fast cause I got some joker out there, salivating and gyrating, and Jay bird, man, drinking out of that chipped wedgwood coffee mug, blowing smoke out into the room, if you get my drift, the moon being the neon bawling open- mouthed wail that it is tonight, so comea comea comea Joanie Maroney, like the “dust of memory,” I need the damn chicken now, what with Jack the Ripper's twin, man, out there glaring and grinding his teeth in toddler panic mode across the table from his bustin'out all over upswept-do wife threatening to bust a gut. 

Annie and I cracking up, rolling babotie balls within the white walled sanctuary of the kitchen at Embree's. Teenage prep staff making scallion curls and maki rolls. Cozy, crazy home

away from home, fun-filled, whacked, warm-hearted lunatic asylum, the allure of the place slightly about my cooking, mostly about Jay, Peter and  Michael. 

Michael: black eye-lashed, sea-sky-hummingbird iridescent eyes, Johnny Depp-James Dean-Kerouac dark drop dead gorgeous, women swooning. Joanie Joanie, where's your gorgeous daughter, Isabella Belly? In the bathroom again? Fooling with her hair? Michael pounding on the door, the walls lined with Youngerman's miniature  loo paintings: “Bella be bop boo, you got customers out here who don't give a crap about your hair.” 

My towering princely son, Blair, the busboy, clearing Michael's tables, looming like Lurch over customers, “you done yet?”  

“Oh, yes, of course, certainly.” They were daunted. “That's my boy,” Uncle Mikey says punching him on the arm behind the partition. My lawyer scolding me for bringing Miss Mamie, my coonhound, to work, who mostly slept under the stove, but once went into the dining room and peed in a customer's pocketbook. 

Michael laughing uproariously, manically moving chairs to make room for live bands, frenzied dancing in blue cigarette haze, former Mundy's Bar bouncer, Harry, dressed in black and biker chains, (“don't mess with me,” except he had the soul of an angel). Art abounding in the foyer and walled-in garden - Deb Koffman's sassy cartoons, Bill Murray's transcendent, evocative sculptures.  

Michael bullying me into joining his writing group, where I began to write and got to sit with hip, brilliant, messed-up poets. Michael reading my stuff out loud and it sounded good, not because it was, but because he read it like Ornette Coleman on the horn. Michael and dearest Barbieo's wedding, the rabbi joining them in front of the service bar.  The two of them beautiful, gifted, doomed: Tristan and Iseult,  Scott and Zelda. 

Michael on the outside of my gates, coming to pick up Blair to go a meeting, jumping up and down like Gerald McBong, Bong. A Maasai warrior gone Eddie Murphy, his head popping up over fence again and again: “ Uncle Mikey's here. Uncle Mikey's here!” Bong bong, the sheer goofiness of a Greek God. 

Has the world ever known three brothers more handsome, dashing, talented, hilarious and wild of heart? Have you read Peter's poetry, his searing, lyrical words? “ There is an I in space, I am, space where a sparrow falls. Who can tell it? When goodbye is the operative word forgiveness is either easy or impossible”.

Have you had your heart broken listening to Tommy sing? “And, I'll be by  your side. When the waters rise and the evening sighs again. Stay with me. Put your arms around me and don't ever leave. Stay with me. put your arms around me and let me be.”

Michael, I remember  your words: “Eternity stuck in the moment for what it reminds you off,” and what I'm reminded of now is your electrifying energy, your brilliance, your  belief  in me, your deep -down goodness and  the love you had for your brothers, Barbieo and your beloved Pilar.  

I'm thinking maybe, probably, you and Jay have found one another by now. God help those wherever you are. The two of you are up to no good with your killer charisms, charming and wooing the bejesus out of  every now dead man, woman, child and dog alike. 

I remember something else you wrote: "I'm a legman. I like glass tables. I love my Life. A good leg'll end a good leg, if anything.” 

Uncle Mikey, until we meet again, I'll read your poems over and over, because when I do, it's the same as running across a field with my arms flung wide open and the sun fine on my face.  

©2013 Joan Embree