I stare into a mug of chamomile tea, both hands wrapped around it. The cup heats my palms and takes the chill out of my finger tips. I glance out the window—it's drizzly and gray, all color dulled to the shades of a charcoal sketch. The temperature outside is not too cold, but my clothes are thin and the wind is piercing, and I still feel it, even in the heat of the empty cafe.
I scoop out the teabag and lay it on the saucer, then pull the letter from my back pocket. It's getting worn and frayed at the folds and edges.
"Anything else for you?" The voice jars me. I look up. The waitress is standing over me. She wears a snug black t-shirt, exposing muscular tattooed arms, big breasts, a belly a bit too big for the shirt. Her hair is short and dark on the sides, but a long amber tendril loops around the side of her neck.
"Something hot. Soup. What kind of soup do you have?"
"I think we have some split pea. It's vegan."
"Yeah, split pea, a bowl."
She glances at the letter in my hand, spins on her heels and walks to the kitchen; her ass, bulging in tight black jeans, swishes.
I unfold the letter and read it for the hundredth time. "Dear Benton, My name is Cheyenne and my mom is Julia Hirschbaum."
I think of Julia again, our few months at UMASS, the joy of her companionship, the constant sex, and the quick disintegration.
"I know you're probably wondering why I'm writing. Well, I read one of my mom's old journals last week and found out that you are my dad. Even though my mom thinks it's not a good idea, I want to know you, if you do.
"I live in Lakewood, Ohio and I'm in sixth grade. I play clarinet and have a Corgi named Klondike. My mom says you love dogs.
"Please text me. My number is 216-226-4277. Love, Cheyenne"
I hold the paper, a clenching in my body: jaw, throat, chest, bicep, fingers pinching the paper. A strain in my thinking—it's so hard to know—to place it somewhere, hang it on something. To know...what to do, yes, but what to think, to feel, even to know what the feelings are.
I think to call Rosie; she would help me sort it out. Explain it to me and tell me what to think, feel, do. But I couldn't. I was the one who left and she says I need to stop turning to her for my problems, that being around me is like ripping off a scab for her.
The waitress is back with a bowl of steamy soup in her hands. She places it in front of me, her right eye crinkled, a question in her expression. She turns to leave, but then turns back. "Are you okay?"
"Great," I say, too gregariously, my mom's tension-induced smile on my face, the one I gave when I was a kid and people asked about my dad, the drunkard. "Just fine."
She nods and heads back toward the kitchen. I grit my teeth and feel my face heating up. What did I show? What absurd look was on my face that told her I was messed up? I study her from behind again, the languid steps, an insinuation in the swish of her hips and ass, in the sway of her back.
I lift the hot bowl to my lips and slurp. The soup burns my tongue and throat, but I like the feeling.
I reach in my back pocket and pull out the letter again. I think back to that night in Phili when I ran into Emmy Choate, one of Julia's old classmates. I had been visiting my brother, probably six months after Julia left, and I was kind of drunk at the time. Emmy told me she heard that Julia was having a baby.
"That's crazy," I said, shocked at someone my age having a kid, someone I had dated not long ago. Once Emmy left, I thought about the timing of the thing and realized it could be mine. I drank till I puked that night, the memory of Emmy's news filed away somewhere I was scared to go near.
I unfold the letter again and read; the handwriting is big, bubbly, optimistic. I think about how she may have suffered with no father, how she must feel. My throat gets tight and I make a grunting sound—then catch myself, shoot a look at the waitress to make sure she didn't notice.
She's staring at me, her eye crinkled again. I clear my throat a few times, trying to cover up the grunting. She walks over to me. "I have to run out for a sec. Are you cool with that?"
"You're leaving?"
"Just for a minute."
"Yeah, okay." She grabs a hoody from behind the counter and steps outside.
Almost instantly a little mustached guy in an apron comes out from the kitchen. He looks toward the door with a sneer, a long wooden spoon in one hand that he taps into the palm of the other. "She's out there smoking, huh?"
"I don't know," I say.
He shakes his head. "Not supposed to leave customers alone in here," he says, thwacking his hand with the spoon now.
"Well, no problem, I can wait out there, too."
"No, I don't want you out. I want her in."
"It's no big deal," I say, as I get up.
She's out there under the awning having a smoke. She gets a startled look when she sees me. "Oh, you want your check?" she says, dropping the half-cigarette and stomping it out.
"No, no, it's just the guy was complaining about me being in there alone."
Her mouth opens wide as if in disbelief, then she laughs. "What a dick."
"It's fine. I don't care." I give her mom's toothy tension smile.
She studies me. "Come back in. It's freezing."
I go back to my seat and she refills my mug with hot water. She starts to leave, but then turns back. "Are you a writer?"
"Me? No."
"I thought that paper might have been a poem or something. You were so deep into it."
"No, it's a letter."
"Oh, see, I'm a poet and sometimes I wrestle with pieces and look like you, all hunched over and angst ridden," she says, curling herself into a tortured hunchback.
I feel the veins of my neck straining, perhaps outdoing mom's smile now. "You're a poet?"
"Yeah, in fact I have a poetry slam tonight." She pulls a postcard-sized flyer out of her apron pocket and hands it to me. "You should come check it out," she says, a shoulder shrug and an open-mouthed grin, teeth and tongue with a dozen insinuations, a grin that gives me a hopefulness that reverberates back to a time when I was about fourteen and Audrey Dunkleberger, sitting beside me on a bench at Lake Tiorati, told me she liked a boy. I kept asking her who till she finally said, "You," and kissed me with the earnestness only possible in the young.
* * *
I step into the basement club, which is dank and windowless and smells of stale beer. A heavy-set guy, unshaven and dumpy, stands on the makeshift stage, croaking into the mic. "My life's an imitation, a cyber cut-out, a fake walk through the shadow of an existential skyscraper, built by land barons of the twentieth century..." He blurts on, his voice cracking, his huge frame hyper and animated in his delivery, the stage shaking under his weight.
"Hey, you came," I hear, Natasha, the waitress, coming from the flank. She hugs me, pressing her heavy breasts into my chest—not a buddy hug. I buy a few bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon at the bar, and then she takes my arm and guides me to a wobbly two-top by the side of the stage.
The big poet towers over us now. He could have been a basketball player in his younger days, but his voice is screechy, like a kid going through puberty: "I'll seek my truth, I'll fight the layer of lie and presumption. I deny the bourgeois lie in my very stance on this black plywood stage..."
I see spit spray in the stage lights, feel the vibration of his stomping feet through my chair. I fear the rickety platform will crumble under his mass. "I am flesh! I am blood! I am meat!" he roars and then is still. I expect thunderous applause, not so much for the words, but for the theatrics—yet the audience is mostly quiet, just a few folks in front clapping and offering supportive words: "You tell them, Blurb," and "Blurb feels it tonight." The MC comes on, gives Blurb a pat on the shoulder, and says they're taking a quick break.
"Cool," I say. "It's like a rap or a rant."
"Oh, yeah, with Blurb, always a rant," Natasha says, like maybe she's heard him one time too many.
"Yeah, that wasn't exactly what I expected when I heard poetry."
"What'd you expect, Chaucer? 'Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,' " she says, like a snooty British professor.
Not only am I impressed as hell, but seeing her shiny lips recite him sends a lusty tingle down my legs. "I didn't know. Never been to one of these."
Her eyes light up. "A virgin? A slam virgin?"
I like her, her big energy and big breasts. "Yeah, I'm just a little virgin," I say, straight posture, hands in my chaste lap.
"Then I'll have to turn you out!" she says, continuing the game.
I laugh, look at her playful face. There's a moment of silence between us, the sounds of the club in the background, our eyes locked. I tip the beer to my lips and take a long drink.
"Really, it's awesome you came," she says.
"I'm glad you invited me. I needed to get out of myself tonight," and the weight of the letter is back with me, the dread of what to do pressing in on me, that little girl, mine.
"I saw that," she says, more serious. "I can kind of see when people are going through something—always had that ability, though with you anyone could tell."
I cringe. What the hell was showing?
"I was like, this dude needs a night out. Plus, he seems pretty cool." She chuckles. "So I just asked. What the hell?" She takes a swig of beer. "I don't hold back or get caught up in 'Should I? Shouldn't I?' Just do it."
I raise my beer over the table and make a toast: "To doing it." She clinks my bottle with hers and we drink.
The MC returns to the stage and starts introducing the next poet. "Mmm, I'm up," Natasha says. She takes off her sweater, revealing acres of skin. She wears a sleeveless leotard with a deep V-cut that barely contains her breasts.
She steps on stage, takes a slow deep breath, and gazes into the audience—a calmness washes over her, like she's meditating.
"My force of life is stronger than your force of death," she says, her voice low and powerful, the stage lights emphasizing her wide hips and full breasts.
"Behold the Earth Mama, no not the Earth Mother, middle-aged in a burlap frock, the Earth Mama, the Goddess, the fertility queen: Aphrodite, Freyja, Parvati. The life giver: Brahma, Bakuba. The green queen healer: Artemis, Angitia, Panacea.
"I run my hand along a polluted stream, pull the toxins into my blood, run them through my organs, cleanse them with my kidneys, and the water turns pure, abundant, full of skeeters and newts. Chuck your plastic Poland Spring, cup your hands in the stream, and bring them to your lips. Quench your thirst.
"For my force of life is stronger than your force of death.
"I lay a hand on my sister's breast, my brother's lung, and purify the cancerous clusters grown from a lifetime of toxins: benzene, thorotrast, arsenic. I absorb the death energy into my palms, neutralize it, and wave it into the sky as nothing but a faint wind, and leave you with nature's bounty: strong muscles, clean pink lungs, powerful blood filling your veins.
"I am the Earth Mama and my force of life is stronger than your force of death, my love stronger than your destruction."
She raises her arms in the air like a ballerina, her muscles taut, and gazes into the lights. The audience claps and cheers. People yell, "Earth Mama! Earth Mama!" I think to ask why the Earth Mama smokes, but am too fucking mesmerized.
* * *
After the reading Natasha takes me to a bar on Fifth Street and Avenue A called Sophie's, a black-walled box with mismatched tables and chairs that look as if they were found on the street. We drink and play pool and hang out late into the night, then make our way to the L train, and back to my place in Brooklyn.
We sit on the sofa, leaning into the warmth of the other, passing a half-bottle of red wine I found under the kitchen sink. I want to enjoy her and the night, and do for moments, but the letter keeps reappearing in my thoughts.
I think about the poetry slam, how it was more an expression of one's battered psyche than my idea of a poem, nothing like the archaic shit I was forced to read in lit classes, drooled over by aesthete professors, the ode to this and that, and anything else removed and irrelevant. That poetry slam was the antithesis of Professor Vanderwerff's passion. It was a confession of one's innermost pain and boldest dreams, with a hip hop attitude. I think how I would like to write a poem about my daughter, a slam poem. I could use the letter to help me create it. In fact, the letter could be it—it is a poem. I could slam it now, I think, right here, for Natasha. She would place it for me, tell me how to handle it, what to do—just like Rosie would have.
I swig the wine, pass it to her, and the energy of the idea drives me to do it, to reach for the letter in my back pocket. "I have a poem for you."
Her face lights up, the loose open grin with the tongue, the opposite of mine. "Let me hear," she says.
I stand in front of her, the floor boards creaking under my swaying body. "Dear Benton," I say, with an emphasis on the "ton," like a Run-DMC rap. "My name is Cheyenne," and already I know it won't work. My throat tightens at the feel of my daughter's name forming in my vocal cords and thrusting through my lips. I push to read the rest, forcing it out in gasps and clipped phrases. "I want to know you...a corgi named Klondike...Love..." I can't bring myself to read her name at the end. "I need someone to help me with this," I say through clenched jaw and constricted throat.
Her eyes are wide and gentle, and the compassion in her face makes her look motherly and beautiful, glowing in the dim light. She stands and steps toward me. I expect her to hug me, but instead she takes the letter from my fingers. It feels like a heavy rucksack dropping from my back. I stare into her face and feel release. She opens her hand and lets the letter fall to the floor. I reach for it, but she pulls me close, firmly, holding my face to her breasts. I feel her mouth, hot and wet, on my ear, neck, then lips. She guides me down to the sofa, on top of her, her body a bed of roundness and softness, and I allow myself to sink deep into her comfort.
* * *
I open my eyes and see the large mound of her hip draped in the burgundy sheet. One pale leg is exposed and her cheek is pressed into the pillow. Her breathing is slow and deep.
The air inside is cold and I notice an open window. A saucer littered with crushed cigarette butts sits on the sill. I slip out of the covers, careful not to disturb Natasha, and pull the comforter over her exposed thigh. I close the window and then look for my jeans, which I find splayed on the wood floor. As I put them on I'm reminded of the letter that I've carried in my back pocket for the past several weeks. I remember her taking it from me, so I go to the kitchen where she dropped it, but there's nothing there—just the faded yellow linoleum. I look around, behind the trash can, in the gap between the refrigerator and stove.
I rush back to the bedroom and lay a hand on Natasha's shoulder. She scrunches her eyes tight, arches her back, then looks up at me—a few big blinks and a smile I can't absorb. "Natasha, the letter, my letter. Do you know where it is?"
She groans sweetly and rolls onto her other side. I walk around the bed and face her. "Natasha, please, do you know what happened to the letter?"
Her eyes focus on me and she smiles again. "You're free."
"What? What's that? I don't get it."
She pushes herself up to an elbow, one stout breast slipping out from under the sheet, and reaches a hand to my cheek. "I couldn't stand to see the pain you were in over that letter."
"But where is it?"
"I got rid of it for you."
My body jolts at her words, my head jerking away from her hand on my face. "No. Why?"
"When I took it from you, your entire demeanor changed. You relaxed, your face became light and handsome. That thing was suffocating you."
"What did you do with it?"
She is silent, then, "It's in the trash."
I run to the white plastic trash can in the kitchen, a crushed milk carton and used coffee filters on top. I flip the thing upside down, dumping the contents onto the linoleum, and there is the letter at the top of the pile, wet and filthy. She must have shoved it all the way to the bottom. I pick it up. It's covered in milk and wet coffee grinds, the purple words dripping down the page.
She's standing there, in jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot. "You couldn't let it go. You said you needed someone to help you. I thought that's what you wanted."
"No, no, I didn't want that. This is my daughter," I say, shaking the wet letter. "This is all I have of her."
"Okay, sorry," she says, but sounding more defensive than sorry. "Obviously you weren't going to call her. The letter was old and frayed. I was trying to help you move on."
"Who asked you to help? You had no fucking right!"
Her eyes widen and she stares at me, a startled look on her face. She shakes her head and walks out of the room. I put the letter under the faucet in the sink and try to rinse off the milk and filth, knowing it won't work, but doing it anyway, wanting to purify it at any cost, but the words wash away, lavender ink bleeding into the sink, the soggy paper tearing at the folds.
I sit on the floor, my back against the cold refrigerator. She clacks through the kitchen, fully dressed now, toward the front door.
"You're going?"
"Yeah," she says like I'm stupid to ask.
"Wait, I don't want you leaving like this. We had a good time."
She crinkles her eye. "I should go. I have work to do today."
"Wait. Can I call you?"
Her eyes meet mine and she's quiet for a time. "I don't know," she says and walks out.
I stay on the cold kitchen floor, staring at the front door. What just happened? Yet another situation to not understand, to not know. In the flux of feelings again, in the tornado of what to do, how to feel, how to place it. I guess I overreacted, but part of me feels like I should have made her eat the letter.
I lean the back of my head against the cold refrigerator door. I'm tired—my body feels limp with exhaustion. But mostly I'm tired of being a child in a man.
I sit there, my thighs and ass flattened on the hard floor, the refrigerator buzzing, trucks and busses droning by in the distance, and I'm cold and sick of it.
I stand up and go to my computer and to the White Pages and search, my finger tips smacking the keys, till I find Julia C. Hirschbaum, C for Clarisse, after her beloved grandma, in Lakewood, Ohio and I dig my cell phone out of my front pocket and with a steady hand punch in the numbers.
A woman answers on the third ring, a serious, melodic voice, that I instantly recognize, even twelve years later.
I scoop out the teabag and lay it on the saucer, then pull the letter from my back pocket. It's getting worn and frayed at the folds and edges.
"Anything else for you?" The voice jars me. I look up. The waitress is standing over me. She wears a snug black t-shirt, exposing muscular tattooed arms, big breasts, a belly a bit too big for the shirt. Her hair is short and dark on the sides, but a long amber tendril loops around the side of her neck.
"Something hot. Soup. What kind of soup do you have?"
"I think we have some split pea. It's vegan."
"Yeah, split pea, a bowl."
She glances at the letter in my hand, spins on her heels and walks to the kitchen; her ass, bulging in tight black jeans, swishes.
I unfold the letter and read it for the hundredth time. "Dear Benton, My name is Cheyenne and my mom is Julia Hirschbaum."
I think of Julia again, our few months at UMASS, the joy of her companionship, the constant sex, and the quick disintegration.
"I know you're probably wondering why I'm writing. Well, I read one of my mom's old journals last week and found out that you are my dad. Even though my mom thinks it's not a good idea, I want to know you, if you do.
"I live in Lakewood, Ohio and I'm in sixth grade. I play clarinet and have a Corgi named Klondike. My mom says you love dogs.
"Please text me. My number is 216-226-4277. Love, Cheyenne"
I hold the paper, a clenching in my body: jaw, throat, chest, bicep, fingers pinching the paper. A strain in my thinking—it's so hard to know—to place it somewhere, hang it on something. To know...what to do, yes, but what to think, to feel, even to know what the feelings are.
I think to call Rosie; she would help me sort it out. Explain it to me and tell me what to think, feel, do. But I couldn't. I was the one who left and she says I need to stop turning to her for my problems, that being around me is like ripping off a scab for her.
The waitress is back with a bowl of steamy soup in her hands. She places it in front of me, her right eye crinkled, a question in her expression. She turns to leave, but then turns back. "Are you okay?"
"Great," I say, too gregariously, my mom's tension-induced smile on my face, the one I gave when I was a kid and people asked about my dad, the drunkard. "Just fine."
She nods and heads back toward the kitchen. I grit my teeth and feel my face heating up. What did I show? What absurd look was on my face that told her I was messed up? I study her from behind again, the languid steps, an insinuation in the swish of her hips and ass, in the sway of her back.
I lift the hot bowl to my lips and slurp. The soup burns my tongue and throat, but I like the feeling.
I reach in my back pocket and pull out the letter again. I think back to that night in Phili when I ran into Emmy Choate, one of Julia's old classmates. I had been visiting my brother, probably six months after Julia left, and I was kind of drunk at the time. Emmy told me she heard that Julia was having a baby.
"That's crazy," I said, shocked at someone my age having a kid, someone I had dated not long ago. Once Emmy left, I thought about the timing of the thing and realized it could be mine. I drank till I puked that night, the memory of Emmy's news filed away somewhere I was scared to go near.
I unfold the letter again and read; the handwriting is big, bubbly, optimistic. I think about how she may have suffered with no father, how she must feel. My throat gets tight and I make a grunting sound—then catch myself, shoot a look at the waitress to make sure she didn't notice.
She's staring at me, her eye crinkled again. I clear my throat a few times, trying to cover up the grunting. She walks over to me. "I have to run out for a sec. Are you cool with that?"
"You're leaving?"
"Just for a minute."
"Yeah, okay." She grabs a hoody from behind the counter and steps outside.
Almost instantly a little mustached guy in an apron comes out from the kitchen. He looks toward the door with a sneer, a long wooden spoon in one hand that he taps into the palm of the other. "She's out there smoking, huh?"
"I don't know," I say.
He shakes his head. "Not supposed to leave customers alone in here," he says, thwacking his hand with the spoon now.
"Well, no problem, I can wait out there, too."
"No, I don't want you out. I want her in."
"It's no big deal," I say, as I get up.
She's out there under the awning having a smoke. She gets a startled look when she sees me. "Oh, you want your check?" she says, dropping the half-cigarette and stomping it out.
"No, no, it's just the guy was complaining about me being in there alone."
Her mouth opens wide as if in disbelief, then she laughs. "What a dick."
"It's fine. I don't care." I give her mom's toothy tension smile.
She studies me. "Come back in. It's freezing."
I go back to my seat and she refills my mug with hot water. She starts to leave, but then turns back. "Are you a writer?"
"Me? No."
"I thought that paper might have been a poem or something. You were so deep into it."
"No, it's a letter."
"Oh, see, I'm a poet and sometimes I wrestle with pieces and look like you, all hunched over and angst ridden," she says, curling herself into a tortured hunchback.
I feel the veins of my neck straining, perhaps outdoing mom's smile now. "You're a poet?"
"Yeah, in fact I have a poetry slam tonight." She pulls a postcard-sized flyer out of her apron pocket and hands it to me. "You should come check it out," she says, a shoulder shrug and an open-mouthed grin, teeth and tongue with a dozen insinuations, a grin that gives me a hopefulness that reverberates back to a time when I was about fourteen and Audrey Dunkleberger, sitting beside me on a bench at Lake Tiorati, told me she liked a boy. I kept asking her who till she finally said, "You," and kissed me with the earnestness only possible in the young.
* * *
I step into the basement club, which is dank and windowless and smells of stale beer. A heavy-set guy, unshaven and dumpy, stands on the makeshift stage, croaking into the mic. "My life's an imitation, a cyber cut-out, a fake walk through the shadow of an existential skyscraper, built by land barons of the twentieth century..." He blurts on, his voice cracking, his huge frame hyper and animated in his delivery, the stage shaking under his weight.
"Hey, you came," I hear, Natasha, the waitress, coming from the flank. She hugs me, pressing her heavy breasts into my chest—not a buddy hug. I buy a few bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon at the bar, and then she takes my arm and guides me to a wobbly two-top by the side of the stage.
The big poet towers over us now. He could have been a basketball player in his younger days, but his voice is screechy, like a kid going through puberty: "I'll seek my truth, I'll fight the layer of lie and presumption. I deny the bourgeois lie in my very stance on this black plywood stage..."
I see spit spray in the stage lights, feel the vibration of his stomping feet through my chair. I fear the rickety platform will crumble under his mass. "I am flesh! I am blood! I am meat!" he roars and then is still. I expect thunderous applause, not so much for the words, but for the theatrics—yet the audience is mostly quiet, just a few folks in front clapping and offering supportive words: "You tell them, Blurb," and "Blurb feels it tonight." The MC comes on, gives Blurb a pat on the shoulder, and says they're taking a quick break.
"Cool," I say. "It's like a rap or a rant."
"Oh, yeah, with Blurb, always a rant," Natasha says, like maybe she's heard him one time too many.
"Yeah, that wasn't exactly what I expected when I heard poetry."
"What'd you expect, Chaucer? 'Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,' " she says, like a snooty British professor.
Not only am I impressed as hell, but seeing her shiny lips recite him sends a lusty tingle down my legs. "I didn't know. Never been to one of these."
Her eyes light up. "A virgin? A slam virgin?"
I like her, her big energy and big breasts. "Yeah, I'm just a little virgin," I say, straight posture, hands in my chaste lap.
"Then I'll have to turn you out!" she says, continuing the game.
I laugh, look at her playful face. There's a moment of silence between us, the sounds of the club in the background, our eyes locked. I tip the beer to my lips and take a long drink.
"Really, it's awesome you came," she says.
"I'm glad you invited me. I needed to get out of myself tonight," and the weight of the letter is back with me, the dread of what to do pressing in on me, that little girl, mine.
"I saw that," she says, more serious. "I can kind of see when people are going through something—always had that ability, though with you anyone could tell."
I cringe. What the hell was showing?
"I was like, this dude needs a night out. Plus, he seems pretty cool." She chuckles. "So I just asked. What the hell?" She takes a swig of beer. "I don't hold back or get caught up in 'Should I? Shouldn't I?' Just do it."
I raise my beer over the table and make a toast: "To doing it." She clinks my bottle with hers and we drink.
The MC returns to the stage and starts introducing the next poet. "Mmm, I'm up," Natasha says. She takes off her sweater, revealing acres of skin. She wears a sleeveless leotard with a deep V-cut that barely contains her breasts.
She steps on stage, takes a slow deep breath, and gazes into the audience—a calmness washes over her, like she's meditating.
"My force of life is stronger than your force of death," she says, her voice low and powerful, the stage lights emphasizing her wide hips and full breasts.
"Behold the Earth Mama, no not the Earth Mother, middle-aged in a burlap frock, the Earth Mama, the Goddess, the fertility queen: Aphrodite, Freyja, Parvati. The life giver: Brahma, Bakuba. The green queen healer: Artemis, Angitia, Panacea.
"I run my hand along a polluted stream, pull the toxins into my blood, run them through my organs, cleanse them with my kidneys, and the water turns pure, abundant, full of skeeters and newts. Chuck your plastic Poland Spring, cup your hands in the stream, and bring them to your lips. Quench your thirst.
"For my force of life is stronger than your force of death.
"I lay a hand on my sister's breast, my brother's lung, and purify the cancerous clusters grown from a lifetime of toxins: benzene, thorotrast, arsenic. I absorb the death energy into my palms, neutralize it, and wave it into the sky as nothing but a faint wind, and leave you with nature's bounty: strong muscles, clean pink lungs, powerful blood filling your veins.
"I am the Earth Mama and my force of life is stronger than your force of death, my love stronger than your destruction."
She raises her arms in the air like a ballerina, her muscles taut, and gazes into the lights. The audience claps and cheers. People yell, "Earth Mama! Earth Mama!" I think to ask why the Earth Mama smokes, but am too fucking mesmerized.
* * *
After the reading Natasha takes me to a bar on Fifth Street and Avenue A called Sophie's, a black-walled box with mismatched tables and chairs that look as if they were found on the street. We drink and play pool and hang out late into the night, then make our way to the L train, and back to my place in Brooklyn.
We sit on the sofa, leaning into the warmth of the other, passing a half-bottle of red wine I found under the kitchen sink. I want to enjoy her and the night, and do for moments, but the letter keeps reappearing in my thoughts.
I think about the poetry slam, how it was more an expression of one's battered psyche than my idea of a poem, nothing like the archaic shit I was forced to read in lit classes, drooled over by aesthete professors, the ode to this and that, and anything else removed and irrelevant. That poetry slam was the antithesis of Professor Vanderwerff's passion. It was a confession of one's innermost pain and boldest dreams, with a hip hop attitude. I think how I would like to write a poem about my daughter, a slam poem. I could use the letter to help me create it. In fact, the letter could be it—it is a poem. I could slam it now, I think, right here, for Natasha. She would place it for me, tell me how to handle it, what to do—just like Rosie would have.
I swig the wine, pass it to her, and the energy of the idea drives me to do it, to reach for the letter in my back pocket. "I have a poem for you."
Her face lights up, the loose open grin with the tongue, the opposite of mine. "Let me hear," she says.
I stand in front of her, the floor boards creaking under my swaying body. "Dear Benton," I say, with an emphasis on the "ton," like a Run-DMC rap. "My name is Cheyenne," and already I know it won't work. My throat tightens at the feel of my daughter's name forming in my vocal cords and thrusting through my lips. I push to read the rest, forcing it out in gasps and clipped phrases. "I want to know you...a corgi named Klondike...Love..." I can't bring myself to read her name at the end. "I need someone to help me with this," I say through clenched jaw and constricted throat.
Her eyes are wide and gentle, and the compassion in her face makes her look motherly and beautiful, glowing in the dim light. She stands and steps toward me. I expect her to hug me, but instead she takes the letter from my fingers. It feels like a heavy rucksack dropping from my back. I stare into her face and feel release. She opens her hand and lets the letter fall to the floor. I reach for it, but she pulls me close, firmly, holding my face to her breasts. I feel her mouth, hot and wet, on my ear, neck, then lips. She guides me down to the sofa, on top of her, her body a bed of roundness and softness, and I allow myself to sink deep into her comfort.
* * *
I open my eyes and see the large mound of her hip draped in the burgundy sheet. One pale leg is exposed and her cheek is pressed into the pillow. Her breathing is slow and deep.
The air inside is cold and I notice an open window. A saucer littered with crushed cigarette butts sits on the sill. I slip out of the covers, careful not to disturb Natasha, and pull the comforter over her exposed thigh. I close the window and then look for my jeans, which I find splayed on the wood floor. As I put them on I'm reminded of the letter that I've carried in my back pocket for the past several weeks. I remember her taking it from me, so I go to the kitchen where she dropped it, but there's nothing there—just the faded yellow linoleum. I look around, behind the trash can, in the gap between the refrigerator and stove.
I rush back to the bedroom and lay a hand on Natasha's shoulder. She scrunches her eyes tight, arches her back, then looks up at me—a few big blinks and a smile I can't absorb. "Natasha, the letter, my letter. Do you know where it is?"
She groans sweetly and rolls onto her other side. I walk around the bed and face her. "Natasha, please, do you know what happened to the letter?"
Her eyes focus on me and she smiles again. "You're free."
"What? What's that? I don't get it."
She pushes herself up to an elbow, one stout breast slipping out from under the sheet, and reaches a hand to my cheek. "I couldn't stand to see the pain you were in over that letter."
"But where is it?"
"I got rid of it for you."
My body jolts at her words, my head jerking away from her hand on my face. "No. Why?"
"When I took it from you, your entire demeanor changed. You relaxed, your face became light and handsome. That thing was suffocating you."
"What did you do with it?"
She is silent, then, "It's in the trash."
I run to the white plastic trash can in the kitchen, a crushed milk carton and used coffee filters on top. I flip the thing upside down, dumping the contents onto the linoleum, and there is the letter at the top of the pile, wet and filthy. She must have shoved it all the way to the bottom. I pick it up. It's covered in milk and wet coffee grinds, the purple words dripping down the page.
She's standing there, in jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot. "You couldn't let it go. You said you needed someone to help you. I thought that's what you wanted."
"No, no, I didn't want that. This is my daughter," I say, shaking the wet letter. "This is all I have of her."
"Okay, sorry," she says, but sounding more defensive than sorry. "Obviously you weren't going to call her. The letter was old and frayed. I was trying to help you move on."
"Who asked you to help? You had no fucking right!"
Her eyes widen and she stares at me, a startled look on her face. She shakes her head and walks out of the room. I put the letter under the faucet in the sink and try to rinse off the milk and filth, knowing it won't work, but doing it anyway, wanting to purify it at any cost, but the words wash away, lavender ink bleeding into the sink, the soggy paper tearing at the folds.
I sit on the floor, my back against the cold refrigerator. She clacks through the kitchen, fully dressed now, toward the front door.
"You're going?"
"Yeah," she says like I'm stupid to ask.
"Wait, I don't want you leaving like this. We had a good time."
She crinkles her eye. "I should go. I have work to do today."
"Wait. Can I call you?"
Her eyes meet mine and she's quiet for a time. "I don't know," she says and walks out.
I stay on the cold kitchen floor, staring at the front door. What just happened? Yet another situation to not understand, to not know. In the flux of feelings again, in the tornado of what to do, how to feel, how to place it. I guess I overreacted, but part of me feels like I should have made her eat the letter.
I lean the back of my head against the cold refrigerator door. I'm tired—my body feels limp with exhaustion. But mostly I'm tired of being a child in a man.
I sit there, my thighs and ass flattened on the hard floor, the refrigerator buzzing, trucks and busses droning by in the distance, and I'm cold and sick of it.
I stand up and go to my computer and to the White Pages and search, my finger tips smacking the keys, till I find Julia C. Hirschbaum, C for Clarisse, after her beloved grandma, in Lakewood, Ohio and I dig my cell phone out of my front pocket and with a steady hand punch in the numbers.
A woman answers on the third ring, a serious, melodic voice, that I instantly recognize, even twelve years later.
