Kyle Kubas
"She dressed up . . ."

She dressed up like a sailor and told me she had a man in every port. I asked if it was Halloween and she said "no, I just felt like it." She woke me up at four a.m. so we could dig bread out of the grocery store's dumpster and feed it to the ducks. Little chocolate candies skittered off my window pane and landed on the driveway where my dad would yell at me later for the melted splotches bruising the concrete, but all she wanted was my attention.

I went away for the summer in a car without a spare tire. I drove through each town whose name sounded soft on my ears, the same way I bet on horses at the track. I took Polaroids of the fiberglass dinosaurs in Arizona and sent her drawings on the complimentary postcards from each roadside motel. Everything was new to me then (I was still a young man of course) and I barely listened to the radion. I bought gas on someone else's credit card, surbiving on Big Gulps and Nutragrain bars. I came back as the wind arrived in our town, unseasonably early that year.

Although we weren't located on the coast, each August there was a spell of hurricane-like winds that swept through the cul-de-scas and avenues. Tree limbs fell, hats were carried off and television reception proved impossible. She liked to twirl around in the wind, spinning faster with arms outstretched, like the flailings of a drowning man seeking rescues, until the gust knocked her over into a pile of extremities on the lawn. She would yell curses at me but they were inaudible over the roar.

She taught me to walk with a swaggering hip and I taught her the secret to solving a Rubik's cube. We bought up all the leftover Valentine's Day candy three days after at the drugstore, reciting haikus written solely from conversation hearts. They knew her name at the diner (open only six hours a day) and the bus boys fed us black and white milkshakes on the sly. We filled her bathtub with raspberry Jello. I called her ont he telephone but she only left notes in my pocket, with faith that I would find them in time for the next adventure.

We danced to her cassette tapes of 1960's soul and sang songs about the zoo. She hoisted me onto rooftops where we had spitting contests. I always won but I think she let me. I gave her caramels to soften in her pocket and push between her lips, but she had a way of forgetting about them and ruining her skirts in the laundry. She invented distant relatives to tell me about and I listened to these stories as i did the Jumble each morning. She liked to Xerox pieces of herself at the library, wallpapering her room with these self-portraits of eyes blissfully closed as she smudged her face against the glass. I preferred the strips of photobooths she tucked in between the spokes of my bicycle wheels, where nothing was distorted and I had time to study the angle at which she held her head.

I explained my blackouts to her, the delight I took in forgetting things before I even formed memories, although it was always disconcerting waking up in other people's beds. She counted fenceposts with her fingertips, snapping her tongue at each crack in the sidewalk. I was forever losing my socks, borrowing pairs with other people's last names scrawled on them, evidence of neighborhood mothers' preparations for camp. She childed me for my absent mind, and I flicked at her knees with my thumb and forefinger.

There are still things I cannot remember of course, like her haircuts or her middle name. It's funny how time warps memory; maybe she never did dance in the wind or perhaps I was much older when I drove my car through the desert, arriving home stained with defeat and yellow dust. Each time I try to revive her face a new detail is missing and I worry that soon she will become a ghost to me, lost forever in the place where only things that are truly important disappear to.

<< Back to Issue 6, 2004