Marginalia

Last evening, N gifted me a book.

It isn’t the one she wants to get me, but later she sits staring at the flyleaf for a long time because she feels the needs for words, and then finds she has none, at that moment.

I picked that book- Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing- because when I flipped it open to a random page, it was to find words jumping at me through fading yellow-green highlights.

That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom.

told her about the baby;

pictures of it

                                                it doesn’t exist

                                    was taken away from me, exported, deported.

                                                                                    Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

I flip to another page.

                                                                        Her artificial face is her natural one.

And facing that

                       

            Dead people’s clothes should be buried with them.

“I’m trying to find a pattern” I say aloud. Although the truth is, I’ve already jumped to conclusions, there’s already a story, and I can see her wrist, slashing through these words.

“Sometimes it’s difficult to tell” says N, and she probably means- not everything is a story. But she’s the one who said last week, every gesture has meaning.

A hand moves across a page leaving trails of ink.

This is not fiction.

Message in a bottle.

SOS in fluorescent yellow instead of Morse.

I want this book.

Later, in the sanctuary of my home, I open it again, this time starting from the beginning. She -I see her wrist, the shell of her ear, the tilt of her foot as she sits with her leg on a windowsill while snow falls softly outside, covering everything over, covering everything up- she’s marked random phrases, sometimes just page numbers, sometimes both the words and the page numbers. I wonder why the page numbers. Did she come back to them? Did she recite the numbers to herself when picking up the paper towels in the supermarket?

50, she says to herself, and that can allow her to make it to the checkout counter.

81, she whispers and she can sign her name on the credit card receipt.

125, and the laundry is neatly folded piles of his and hers.

Everything doesn’t have meaning, everything doesn’t need meaning.

Why do I suspect that if you cut me I’ll bleed blood and alphabets?

I think we’re all just stories we tell ourselves.

Stories that begin with I.

Stories that involve you, we, they, us.

Sometimes we let other people tell those stories for us, because we don’t have the vocabulary.

Maybe that’s what she was doing, watching the bare branches dripping, twisted, as quiet, quiet, winter melts around her into the noise of spring.

 Margaret, be my voice,

sister ,mother, friend, ally ,lover.

This is what Margaret says to her, for her.

Do you have a twin?

                                               

                                                Now we are on my home ground, foreign territory. My throat constricts, as it learned to do when I discovered people could say words that would go into my ears meaning nothing,

Anesthesia; that’s one technique: if it hurts, invent a new pain. I’m all right.

That won’t work, I can’t call them “they” as if they were someone else’s family:

                                    But they’ve cheated, we’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.

Has he come back yet?

I thought there might be something about me

But this isn’t where I live.

  What impressed him at that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I was feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.

                                                            If he’s safe I don’t want to see him. There’s no point, they never forgave me, they didn’t understand the divorce

                                               

                                                which wasn’t surprising, since I didn’t understand it myself.

                                                my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing.

why it wasn’t really mine.

My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for year and the others wouldn’t notice.

                                    The feeling I expected before but failed to have comes now, homesickness, for a place where I never lived, I’m far enough away;

The fence is a reproach, it points to my failure.

                                    I never identified it as mine;

It was my husband’s, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator.

                        I couldn’t prove it though; he was clever: he kept saying he loved me.

            It’s turned grayer in nine years too, like hair.

                                    When she died, I was disappointed in her.

                                    It’s unusual for him to ask me anything about myself:

I’d turn into a part of a couple, two people linked together and balancing each other, like the wooden man and woman in the barometer house at Paul’s.

                                                                                                here everything echoes.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I love him.

                                    It wasn’t even a real decision, it was more like buying a goldfish or a potted cactus plant, not because you want one in advance but because you happen to be in the store and you’ve seen them lined up on the counter.

                                                nice if he meant something more to me.

                                               

                                                Impossible to be like my mother.

I can imitate anything.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable, or ridiculous.

“Did you believe that stuff when you were little?” she says. “I did, I thought I was really a princess and I’d end up living in a castle. They shouldn’t let kids have stuff like that.”

                                                            later I became an escape artist of sorts, expert at undoing knots.

Perhaps I’m growing old at last, can that be possible?

I stand there shivering

                                                                        push myself reluctantly into the lake.

I needed

 a different version.