Lessons in Healing From the Aisles of Target

August 2016

            I’m kneeling in the aisle like a worshipper dropping tears into the white ceramic shell of an armadillo.

            What else would you do on your inaugural Target run in a new town you thought you would love but don’t even like?

            I’m forty years old and I left Austin, Texas, and a teaching career for an MFA. I already feel I’ve made a grave error and classes haven’t even started. I will forever tell the story of the precise moment I knew this journey was doomed, not in Louisiana even though in the hotel that first night I woke up at 3 am startled, alert, and deeply uneasy. Not in Mississippi where following a downpour a rainbow arched like a great shimmering gate over the highway and though we didn’t drive under it like a fairy tale it felt like we might. Not in Alabama which made the moving truck swoon with the heady perfume of pine forests, not even South Carolina when the sea became a force we felt in our chests and excitement beat against us in thick salty waves.

            It was at midnight, crossing the Cape Fear.

           All the little lights of Wilmington, North Carolina, winked at me.

           They spelled out beware.

           This message only deepened as we entered the town, waited for a train, the desire to jump out and run, tearing my way back through the piney forests, ripping the gates off the hinges under the rainbow, sprinting arms pumping back to Austin, to Crockett High School room #205, slipping back into the skin of Ms. Hammond, the ninth-grade reading teacher, bringing a new book to one of her students, ah yes – the perfect book.

            Ms. Hammond had a long lost dream to write her own books.

            That’s why she crossed the Cape Fear.

            At the stop, waiting for the train which dragged itself like the tail of a worn out animal on its way into the woods to die, I was awash with an eerie sense, an Edgar Allan Poe dread that I had met Wilmington before, years ago too far back to remember in the murky fog of a bad dream.

            Remember me? I’m not what you hoped, and I won’t be kind to you.

            It was too late to run.

            So I’m kneeling in the aisle of Target weeping into a white ceramic armadillo with gold accents on his snout and in a band across his shell. I was looking for a lamp for my desk for the long nights I envision myself writing the book I came here to write at the second-floor window of the cheap rental townhouse overlooking the shrubbery that’s overcome with vines like most of the south, wild and unruly, the home of redbird pairs that whoosh past with the beating blur of wings, who will be my friends in the daytime but I need a lamp for the long writing nights and here of all things – is an armadillo lamp.

            I want to say it’s a sign but The Religion I was raised in warned us from signs and symbols, divination, fortune-telling. That’s why I blew off the dream I had before moving, though it was one of the most vivid of my life every minut detail like a tattoo seared into my psyche, the plane I was on, nose-diving, shuddering, spiraling, bursting into flames, bolting awake sweaty and shaking I gave in, looked up the interpretation, the furtive, heavy creep and crawl of guilt mixed with fear that trying to interpret a dream was an invitation to The Demons, asking them to stick to my brain with the clawed fidelity of seeds to a sweater.

            I left The Religion but The Religion has not left me.

            My father was the one who chose The Religion during Vietnam another form of war he brought home and he continued to love it with unabated loyalty long after it had betrayed us with a heap of abuses, much the same way he chose my mother and continued to choose her no matter what she did love covers a multitude of sins.

            Even when he was dying and running out of time to see the little girl he took fishing and ice-skating, out on carpet cleaning jobs, the chatty girl who commandeered the copilot seat on road trips and tried to read the map, swinging her legs on a stool in his workshop talking his ear off but hadn’t he loved her then? He made no move that might distress his wife, such as inviting their estranged daughter to his deathbed.

            The estranged daughter was scared he would ask.

            If he asked she would have to face her fear of her own mother at age forty when you’re told to be over things not scared anymore healed and she’s not, oh no no no she’s not, and all it would take is one mean look from her mother one of those Jack O’ Lantern sneers turning eyes into dark triangles to hurl her right back down (after all the climbing she’s done!) to the weakest part of herself that never stood up but ran instead.

            But if he’d asked.

            When he wrote me he was sick and it was bad I mentally rehearsed jumping in my old barely drivable teacher-mobile without packing or brushing my hair. I imagined driving all day, staring into the sad dusty eyes of those Oklahoma small towns teeth grit hands white-knuckling the steering wheel crossing into Missouri. Saw myself screeching into the hospital parking lot wild-haired and wild-eyed and if she tried to stop me or say a single word at all flinging her aside with that ruthless courage born of love. Grabbing his hand and gripping it, the hand that played harmonica, made my swing at his band saw, held the flashlight on our armadillo hunts

             We tiptoe together into the lush summer woods. Dad halts, flicks on the flashlight, and oh, the exhilaration, the triumph! That bizarre pig, his armor like a rustic stone floor broken up and dirty, he snuffles and snorts scratching in the leaves and dirt – then jumps straight up, caught in the circle of light. He stares hairy snout wiggling then turns and hoofs it foliage crackling, tail dragging, pale and luminous as a slice of moon. Dad and I turn to each other slap our knees and laugh.

             He didn’t ask.

             “You should get it.”

              I look up into the eyes of a woman maybe in her sixties near my mother’s age only with beach tanned skin, piercing blue eyes, silver hair in a bun tilted sideways saying it’s been a day along with her wrinkled blue scrubs. She smiles. “I mean, if something makes you feel that much, you have to get it.”

             “It’s an armadillo.” I hold it up.

              Gamely, she runs her hand across the white and gold armor. “Would you look at that! So cute.”

              “It makes me think of my dad.”

               Her eyes flick to my face.

               The thing is I’m forty and not healed and I don’t even know what that means or if I believe in it and I thought I would be happy in a beach town getting to write and graduate with a freaking Master’s degree after years of being told by The Religion that higher ed is the path to destruction and yet I’m still ten-years-old looking left right and center for a mother to love me.

               Or maybe, my dad.

               This lady in the scrubs with the sideways bun, red basket full of frozen dinners and wine, turns her tired eyes to mine and says, “Then you should definitely get it, my dear,” and with a grave and tender sort of fierceness she leans in, whispers, “It’s a sign.”

June 2021

           The frozen aisle stretches the length of the far right side of the store.

            I have been staring at the ice-cream for five years.

            Phish Food. Cherry Garcia. Peanut Butter Cup.

            A glimpse of myself in the glass leaning on my cart in the same posture as my grandma who’s been dead for twenty years and the jolt is enough to make me blink, a seaside Rip Van Winkle waking up.

            I wrote a book, graduated, and turned into a completely different creature.

            Didn’t know as I was hopping the bus, debating in workshops, proud of my new backpack, bounce in my step, ponytail swinging like a middle school girl, as the manuscript pages grew at my desk with the armadillo lighting the way, as the day drew near, the first graduation ceremony of my life, jubilant and extraordinary in the sweet golden threads of May evening pine-filtered light standing on those steps I never expected to be yet there I am, it’s me! with my cohorts all of us at once tossing our caps such a frank celebration – didn’t know these years I’d spend in the MFA were the Last Days

of my estrogen.

             Pistachio Pistachio. Rum Raisin. Karamel Sutra.

             A menopausal Rip Van Winkle, stroking my long gray beard.

              I crossed the Cape Fear in tight jeans, wore badass black boots with buckles and silver studs, faded jean jackets, my hair wicked curly, a snug sequin dress glittering for my thesis reading, high heels like skyscrapers, forty-three and I’d never worn such sexy things (The Religion condemned even pantyhose) my husband escorted me up to the stage because I didn’t know never learned how to walk in heels, was scared I’d fall, graduated in a slinky silver dress moon skin clinging to me like hard-earned pride.

              Now see me in my husband’s XL Hollow Knight tee and big dude shorts that kindly droop instead of bite my big belly rounded with the urgency and passion of hormonal madness, hair gone gray, falling out along with sex, along with joy, so much lower back pain hurts to bend, to walk, hot flashes like wildfires set loose spreading sporadically inside me burning up every last thing that makes me me, and no one can see, no one can see! All alone in this terrible, treacherous skin, sometimes god help me except there is no god to help just want to claw my way free!

              Chunky Monkey, Vanilla Caramel Fudge, Coffee Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz.

              Most of my cohorts moved got agents got book deals got good jobs in cool cities and I’m still here turning into petrified wood. My students who had such faith have stopped asking Hey, Ms,. when’s your book comin’ out?

               The only job that wanted me was retail it’s a beach town and the service industry booms and my favorite thing to sell was an octopus corkscrew and I loved on the customers even though I was ashamed of myself for not doing better and social media really is a dark den of crack-comparison and countless chances to meet The Demons not “out there” flaming through the ether but the ones who already have their shoes off, feet up on your rock bottom coffee table, wiggling their toes smoking’ a smoke and just waiting for you to finally get there.

               At 2am when I’m wine drunk and can’t sleep I Google long endless days of intense alienation and suffering and besides menopause find Dark Night of the Soul another way to say Crisis of Faith or as Indian professor Inayat Khan states, “…a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.”

               My book which became my thesis about family and faith, the two institutions that feed us and keep us slaves, but you’re not supposed to say that God was Mom and Mom was God and God is Love and also Armageddon which is a complete and total mind fuck how they caress and then turn on you as Uzzah found out when God struck him dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant while trying to rescue it and if you look up why you will find endless cerebral and complex rationalizations because that’s how it happens in our families with our Narcissist Lords, they always get the most beautifully woven, elaborate excuses.

               The place where Uzzah was executed by God now called Perez-Uzzah or “Outburst Against Uzzah” and don’t we have our family homes mapped out in memory just like this the places where the decimations occurred cornered by the fridge or in the shadows of the laundry room or the quaking in the driveway that one night and the surprise at how our knees literally knocked together.

                They had the power to make us and then blow us to bits, over and over again, for years and years, until finally we were too broken all over the place like scrambled egg souls for any king’s men to put us back together again, my thesis advisor wrote on my pages the mother’s ability to create domestic tranquility has an almost velvety draw, she really is so magnetic, and you can feel the protagonist’s need of a mother, and her eternal hope, that her mother will not revert and turn destructive and the Israelites probably hoped the same because they were dumb, too, and what my advisor wrote on my pages was everything and made me feel seen and was that why I crossed the Cape Fear and spent three years here writing the most grueling fucking truths, just to share the most vulnerable scenes from my young life with someone kind and wise after years of bewildered anguish to have them witness and say yes, I see, and it makes total sense.

              Half Baked, Ice Cream Sammie, Netflix and Chill’d.

              The book didn’t make it in the world.

              The last time I saw my father on earth he told me he was a failure and that he saw himself in me and it feels like he cursed me with those parting words and I’ve been fighting this curse by doggedly dreaming and taking risks and here I am with a Master’s that made me so wicked proud yet now I’m thinking it makes me absurd and interviewers think I just want to write not learn everything there is to know about HIPAA so I should probably take it off my resumé. I think about how my father was suckered in by The Religion the marketing was so good all jewel tones and you can live forever! He was super smart an engineering major and yet he totally bought into their marketing and is that me with the MFA?

              I homeschooled through high school and after leaving The Religion earned my BA online. I’d never had a real graduation and as the MFA ceremony drew closer I drove down to the beach and practiced the iconic cap toss, again and again, flinging my straw hat into the sunset, wanting to get that long-awaited moment just right. No matter how much I rehearsed, the actual moment on the steps when I tossed my graduation cap with a joyful shout it flew back to earth and clocked me in the nose and damn it hurt! I laughed but

              What if the path to Paradise turns out to be the thing that breaks you.

              Or maybe you’re impaled by the spikes of your own foolish hope because even when he was dying he didn’t think he was and texted me he was making progress when he was in the hospital for the last time gaining weight he said (most likely because they were feeding him through a tube but he took that as healing) so maybe that’s why he didn’t go ahead and say come see me – or – I love you.

              A hundred agent rejections.

              I planted a wild and frisky pollinator garden that breaks all the HOA rules and they hate me for it and it’s really not smart to piss off the HOA because they’re like The Religion and they’ll kill you by taking everything away but the garden is where I’ve landed, in pieces, and where I’m trying to put myself back together again in a different shape you can’t get fractured this much and not turn out jaggedy, and I don’t mean gold laced Kintsugi fractures but deep and difficult and kind of ugly but the neighbor who just moved in next door doesn’t see I’m broken, I’m rubble, and he innocently saunters over to admire the garden, the butterflies around my head a living crown or halo is what he sees, and he gives me career path ideas because even though I’m short on hope and hormones he thinks I’m smart and can still make it in the world: PhD professor, writing center director, project manager…

              He can’t see the quicksand only the zinnias and doesn’t know that every suggestion for what I become is another brick stacked on my head sinking me deeper.

               I dreamed of dad.

               I found him sitting alone on a bench and I sat down beside him. I don’t know where we were the setting was opaque and his head was bowed he didn’t look at me and when I spoke it was all the hard painful questions Why didn’t you…? He stood up waved me off and stalked away.

                I woke up thinking well if that was heaven that sucks.

               Most of our townhome community is blank because it’s poor and cheap and the landlord is the kind that paints over mold in the ceiling but we live alongside a little forest, a green gem, and along with the garden these quiet soulful little trees have become my haven, heaven, saving grace, it’s like we’re all at church together but not the one I grew up where the Rules forced you to divorce yourself, no, with the trees we are united under the same sanctuary window of sky and we’re just mourning and praising, mourning and praising, all day together me and the trees, since I was laid off during Covid and I’m not the writer I thought I would be and the trees love it when I cry because it makes sense to them as a kind of singing when everyone else is frightened away so I don’t go out in this wretched town anymore

               except to Target to stare at ice-cream.

               Americone Dream…

               The lights go out.

               Not a flicker first, just – gone.

               No one letting us know why.

               Ominous.

               Two girls scurry from the darkness, stand next to me. One at either elbow and they are texting like mad. The screens illuminate their drawn faces, darting eyes, tap-tap-tapping I love you goodbye because you have to be fast these days assuming the worst, waiting for the gunshots, trapped in the shooting spree. One of the girls looks up at me, her dark eyes so wide and she’s probably only seventeen long hair so shiny even in the dark I can see how loved she must be and now here she is, trembling beside me. She says, “What’s happening?” They both look at me then. Sisters, I think. I never had kids for many reasons and it’s too late now though I still don’t wish for it however these girls are my charge and I imagine what a mother who loves them might want me to say.

               I nod to the doors behind us, the Employee Area, and tell them, “This is probably the safest place in the store to be.” Of course I don’t know, I don’t know anything, and never have. See, nothing humbles you quite like the memory standing on people’s doorsteps with a Bible trusting you are giving them the truth with such conviction that some of those people believe get baptized and you carry the weight of that because when you convert people you change their life forever only to realize – you were wrong.

              But the two girls here with me in the dark look at the Employee doors behind us as if they’ve found something to hold onto, faces relaxing so when the power shudders back on

              They hug me.

              We hold on tight.

              And the love that flows out of my fingertips!

              I thought I came here for ice-cream.

              But it was for this.

November 2023

              Less than a week before Thanksgiving is a good time to buy cat food because the crowd congests in the aisle where stuffing is.

              I’m filling up my basket because somehow we have three cats now. They arrived from who knows where looking rough and plagued and paranoid and I imagine them crossing the Cape Fear thinking oh hell and now they’ve got clipped ears and limps and scabs, hypersensitive startle reflexes, and bone deep distrust even for their own instincts, which led them here.

             The HOA chopped down my forest my little tree friends the one place I found mercy and grace and that unconditional something God is said to give and doesn’t really but the trees do. Yeats said, “Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine…” and I still do but the HOA is a ruthless cult slaughtering the sacred because they worship Rules not beauty not trees not people not love Rules. They went after the one thing here I loved that little forest like a found family they clear cut it in two days left stumps like naked insults in a pile of ash. All alone in the townhouse watching them do it, the relentless saws coming for my leafy friends who held me in the deepest darkest, utter helplessness turning to rage, screaming at myself in the mirror I saw

              my mother’s face.

              I thought when I left I’d never have to see that again

              terrified me to know she could come at me again with such hate

              From within.

              I had to face that face

             And the way I feel about me

             that clear-cut land that ugly wound that gash that scar and it seemed to me to be charred, smoking, and I thought again about that dream I dreamed before moving here, images I’ve never been able to shake, the plane spiraling down, the fire, the ruins, and I thought – it came true.

              That dream, at least, did.

              We tried to move from this town twice and each time was a panic of hope but each opportunity fell through and now every little thing costs like the cat food piling up in my basket a dollar a can! The price of cat food shooting cortisol through my veins how can we even touch the dream of moving now?

               I’ve been scrambling for money tutoring online and the cavity I did my best to deny kept getting worse turning into the Grand Canyon I thought I could fall into it and disappear. At the dentist I was trembling as they got me settled in the chair and left me there staring out the picture window with a bird feeder and while I waited shivering all raw skin and feelings, a little bird came and stayed the whole time, that presence such a sweet gift a consolation so when the dentist hurried in concerned I’d had to wait, I told her, “The bird and I are friends now.” She smiled and said, “We put a bird feeder in front of every window for our patients.”

                I thought – that’s love.

               Then I felt like I could tell her and she gripped my hand when I said, “My dad died from oral cancer.”

                A truth I have tried not to say think or believe he was deep in The Religion and never smoked, drank, or chewed, and he had a collection of fancy electric toothbrushes water picks and fifty kinds of floss –

                It was early when they caught it but he refused treatment and tried to heal himself believed to the end he would never have to die yet lived with this heavy unrelenting despair about life I remember when we were on our way home one day from cleaning carpets together and he told me how many hours of his life he spent driving around in that van and his business never prospered the way he wished and dad, I heard you, your pain grew roots went deep in me and I wished there was something I could say or do or be to extinguish that defeat on his face and in the end the tumors took over his tongue and cheeks and mouth until he couldn’t speak.

                  But he could text.

                  The day I found out he was in the hospital I took the day off from teaching and walked around the north Austin neighborhood from morning until night pacing like it was my own cactus-and-aloe filled waiting room six hundred miles away sending him pictures of every little beautiful thing the last walk we would take and texted I love you at least a dozen times and thought he’d died when I heard nothing back then later when I found out he was still there it was easier to think, he never got any of my fifty plus texts.

                  That’s not the ending anyone wants.

                   I want you to know I’m not writing this from the other side where things worked out I got my dream and I’m healed because I still don’t know what healed is and I’m still hurting, fighting to make it, to figure out life and nearing fifty now so don’t know if I ever will, risks are real risks and

                    I thought I crossed the Cape Fear seven years ago.

                    I’m still crossing.

                     I lug my basket heavy with cat food to the front of the store, the lines so long and snaking are we here to check out or buy Taylor Swift tickets? I eye the debut novels on display by the candy seized by immense longing and heartache picturing the sixteen-year-old girl on her bike when her first short story was published, riding to the post office on Great River Road alongside the Mississippi to send the signed contract, her hair in an updo like an Edwardian Gibson Girl, little natural curls falling down, framing her face, god she is expansive with her contract in hand, heart wide open to the world just believing so hard this is the beginning.

                      I have to tell that girl what happened.

                      Have to tell her, she’ll never be that young author signing books in a bookstore she had once dared to envision. Have to say

                       We had so much work to do.

                       We had to break free from our family.

                       Then our faith.

                       She’ll look at me, stunned. Can’t speak.

                        Sink to the floor, bury her head between her knees.

                         I know.

                        Can’t stop the breaking.

                        I’m still writing, still trying for you…

                        but it’s hard for her to hear when

                        she’s grieving things she thought she’d never leave.

                       “Shut the fuck up you fucking bitch!”

                        The man’s scream overpowers, blots out the chatter of the crowd, the holiday music.

                         “I will mess you up!”

                         He lets out a stream of obscenities at another customer and everyone is paralyzed, motionless, except for the checker checking out can after can of endless cat food from my basket, her eyes fixed on the rager, and inside I’m ducking and hiding trying to flee the bomb blasts let me out, let me out, when rage like this starts, you never know who will be next. I recall the stricken face of a pen pal from war torn Croatia who came to visit my family during Fourth of July, the firecracker shrieks and whistles carved his face into a sculpture of horror, ready to sprint for the bomb shelter, like I would run to my closet or out to the trees and now I just want to run but focus my gaze on the cashier and breathe as the man starts screaming at management trying to intervene – “Go fuck yourselves!”

                        I say to her, “I’m sorry you’re going through this.”

                        She gives her head a little shake and says, “Oh, I’ve heard way worse.” And yes I see in her features the tight-lipped unhappy toughness of someone who has heard way worse, way too many times.

                         I take in everyone gripping carts and children witnessing the emotional and verbal violence I see the flinching wincing desire to duck and cover, how nice so many of our families seemed, how we curled up like orange peels at the bottom of our closets after a brawl and we always believed – we were alone.

                        We were never alone.

                       “How many cats you got?” the cashier asks, because there are still more cans, unceasing cans, and I say, “Three now! All rescues!”

                        She grins and shouts, “I have two! Siamese! Brother and sister, can’t stand to be apart!”

                       “We have two, too!” The woman behind me pipes up, grabbing her husband’s hand. He smirks says, “Yeah, but they can’t stand each other.”

                       “Oh now,” she elbows him, “you know they love each other deep down.”

                       “We’ve got one and she’s spoiled rotten!” An older lady in the next line shouts. “Every year she eats another piece of the Christmas tree.”

                         Everyone laughs and more stories arise, from people standing in other    lines.

                        “Ours eats mac n cheese!”

                         “Mine sat on me for three days after surgery, the very place that needed healing.”

                          “Awww…” hums through the store.

                           We can’t even hear him now (the rage) just the stories going round.

                           “Thank you,” I say to the checker looking her right in the eye.

                            She winks.

                            Some things rip the fabric of the universe.

                           She picked up a needle and some thread, passed it around.

                           Each of us had a hand, just now, sewing each other up.

                           I was part of the repairs.

                           I push through the doors with my bags, pause to look back over my shoulder at the bright lights, red carts, red vests, and crowd. I will never love this town.

                             But I love them.

                             And tonight

                             I’m glad I’m here.

Photo by pawel szvmanski on Unsplash