Convertibles Aren’t Funny
She would just get it; I would make a joke thinking I’d swaddled a kind of magic and her laugh scattered the covering everywhere. She’d gin up the twist, too, put me on my back heel but in a provocative style, as though she was laying me on the bed and I wouldn’t be in control for a minute. Sometimes she would play it cold. Like she didn’t get the joke. But she did. This can be delicate. But a second wall of doors appeared and she’d choose the right one. There was no losing. There wasn’t.
One afternoon I picked her up and she started crying. Her co-worker had been bragging that her husband’s architecture firm was building the largest animal testing facility in the city. She’d given this proud genocidist the business, my girl, even when her co-worker screamed, Maybe we can kill a few thousand rabbits to cure my father’s stomach cancer, both digging their heels to the point HR had to get involved, considering some of the things said, threats made. Her tears seemed to hit the seat before she did. It was a convertible and we had a bunch of jokes about convertibles, since we were borrowing one, but I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate the jokes without feeling forced, a potential final straw to her afternoon.
She had three lime green vases. There were egrets painted on the side. The vases had a wide base but a very narrow opening, a symbolic structure that — she admitted with a sense of self-deprecation, which I told her to quit — “mirrored” her appetite for life. The vases had specific functions. She always put a single flower in the first vase (the opening couldn’t fit more than two stems); the flower species and color corresponded to a chart she’d invented and wouldn’t share. She filled the second vase with ashes of poems I’d write for her, tickets of shows we saw, joints we smoked, bar booth photos we took, tags of clothing we snipped, the dead flowers, art from friends, bits of elegant wood she’d find, until the ash overflowed and she’d dump everything in the trash and start over. She filled the third vase to the rim with water, so that a rounded edge of water poked out.
