Tower

 “You are very beautiful.”  He sounds a little frightened, a little tired, and somehow resigned.  She studies him and is glad that his gaze does not drop from hers.  He is older, older than her by at least twenty years but he is very handsome; large blue eyes and black hair, looking all the darker for the silvery gray at his temples he does not try to hide.  His hands, long and gnarled but strong, hang between his knees, elbows on his thighs, his fingers loosely woven together.

 Beautiful man.

She feels her heart actually throb and so allows herself a small smile.  She looks away from him.

 The morning is beautiful and she is annoyed that she has guests.  The house is large with plenty of room so anyone who remotely knows her finds her home in Indiana a convenient stopping point.  He is the employer of a first cousin ; well-mannered, and not at all disdaining of her rambling old farm house.  Her cousin is ready to go after dinner and an evening together but he is tired and said so.

 “I’m not as young or as rambunctious as you, George.  Give me another day.”

 “We need to be in New York in threedays.”

“Plenty of time.”

 “We should have taken an airplane.”

 He looks at her, his large blue eyes darkening before her and says, “yes, George we probably should have.”

The shift in attention is not missed by George who shrugs and goes outside to smoke.  So  the two of them talk well into the night and it is she who finally says she needs to go to bed.  He stands without a word and she leaves the dining room and makes her way upstairs.  Her guests stay in the bedrooms downstairs, within the new part of the house.  She retreats to her second floor sanctum alone.

 Yet he finds her in the morning.  She awakes early and makes coffee.  She sits upon the second floor open balcony.  The old house is square and solid with jutted rooms and roofs off the main house; evidence that the old house was never quite big enough over the last 123 years of its existence.  Now the house only protects her, a dog, a cat and cousins who drop by with their friends or oddly enough their eccentric boss.

 “So how long have you lived in…where am I?”

 “Indiana.  All my life.”

 His look of surprise makes her laugh.

 “George tells me it gets really hot in the summer and bitter cold in the winter.”

 “Yes.”

 “And you stay?”

 “Indiana is my home.”

 He sees her on the second floor balcony, sitting upon her white plastic chair at her green plastic table, tapping away at her new laptop computer which holds within its memory all her writing.  He comes up uninvited.  As he moves up the small flight of stairs, she notices his still broad shoulders, and still straight back.

 “I call London my home, and LA that is home too, I guess.”

 She says nothing but politely stops tapping away at her laptop computer that sits upon the green plastic table.

 And then he tells her she is beautiful.  She studies his face and hands, smiles slightly and looks away. She looks out upon the newly greening trees; tall and dormant for so

long this winter, now budding out and waving gently before her in the May breeze.  A tear stings her eye.

 She wonders why George has come and brought his boss.  When will they learn

to just leave her alone?

 Beautiful.

 Odd, she hears that often enough now, well after forty, but never before. She can tell he is confused by her tear and his beautiful eyes frown in confusion.  She waits patiently and without complaint until the tear rolls from her eye and drops upon her folded hands.  She makes no attempt to move and thinks perhaps he has not noticed, after all.

 He stands, moves his plastic chair closer to her.  He gently traces the course the tear has taken down her cheek.  The tip of his finger slightly roughened and his breath drying her skin tightly were the one tear traveled down her face.

 “Do you like your cousin, George?”

 She shrugs.  She really has no feeling one way or the other.  He is her cousin, stopping by once a year to see her and his Grandparent’s old house in Indiana.  A trip of nostalgia that he talked too much about to his boss one day and now is forced to make the trip and pretend to like it.  Indiana and his Grandparents’ old farmhouse is simply the place he and his family moved away from to find a better life in California.  Her Grandfather would often wonder how their lives went, ingratiating themselves to the rich but she never mentioned her Grandfather’s ramblings to George.

 “Your cousin in very clever, a very hard worker,” he says after studying her. She wonders suddenly if he read minds.

She turns and looks into his bright blue eyes, well hooded, smiling but in a sad sort of way.  She says nothing.

 “Come away with us.  Come with us to New York and then we will fly to LA and I’ll show you my home.  It is a large place, just me.  George works there during the day.  I have a wine cellar and a pool that flows from one level of my back yard to another.  It looks out on trees and lawn.”

 She looks out upon her yard.  The Hickories, too tall and narrow, the oak trees blasted by wind and storm.  The pine trees dead on the bottom and towering over the weedy herb garden.  Her Grandfather’s flower garden small and manageable and the vegetable garden just recently plowed and seeded.  The May wind whips up from the west and curls around the old farmhouse.

 “No thank you,” she says, “I prefer my tower.”

 

Sandra K Woodiwiss ©2012

Kiss

When I watched her die, I did not touch her hair.  I kissed her hands and I said some words, I don’t know what, I spoke to her and then she was gone.

 I don’t remember leaving the hospital.  My Dad was there and my brother, I remember that but I don’t remember what car we drove or what exit we left from or what time of day she died.  I simply woke up in this funeral home.

 Funeral home;  hell of a name.

 So I walked up to her casket, black - shinny black - and looked at her, the only thing I recognized was her hair.

 She never wore a lot of make up.  I can see her standing in the bathroom daubing on a little powder and applying some eyeliner, that was it, we were ready to go.  I love that about my wife, she…well she never spent a lot of time in front of the mirror and never failed to look good.

 My wife, she hates the beach, well hated the beach but loved to walk the fairs and craft shows in the area.  I can see her smiling and talking to people she didn’t know.  Men of all ages would take a second glance.  Nothing to upset me, and she never noticed.  It was her smile I guess and her enthusiasm about a knitting technique or a spinning wheel, that turned heads.  She loves things like that – I mean - well, I hope she still does.

 So now, here we are the two of us, me and my wife.  My mom, sobbing in the background and my brother wearing his suit that he never wears except at funerals, is standing within my peripheral vision.  It suddenly occurs to me we stood like this at our wedding.  Yet, I don’t recognize my mom’s voice and my brother’s shadow and I don’t know this woman in the casket, except her hair.  So I reach forward and touch her hair.

 Brittle.

 Her hair was always soft and shinny, I can see it lace through my fingers.  I loved to make love to her and tangle my hands in her hair.  She never complained and I know that sometimes it hurt that I wanted her so badly.

 I’d buy her flowers when we were dating and once she let me put daisies in her hair.  We got married soon after that, she said she was very happy.

 So I lift her hair and watch it cascade down upon the white pillow of her casket, limp, and dull and all in a clump and then I realize she is dead.  Her dying didn’t seem to clue me in.

 What sort of man am I?

 Who is this woman no tiara of daisies upon her head, no spinning wheel to tread?  I bend at the waist and kiss her now thin and shapeless lips.  The room gasps behind me.

 Nothing, no nothing, will bring her back again.

  

Sandra K. Woodiwiss © 2012

Glass Hill

 “He was a jerk.”

 “Well, he must not have been that bad, I’ve heard you say worse about ‘the former boyfriend.’”

 Rachel looked over at Karen.  She was looking out the window and not really focusing on her rant.

 “What’s up with you?”

 “Nothing,”

 Rachel knew from experience that Karen’s ‘nothing,’ always met something.

 “All, right, what is it?  We have at least a twenty minute drive back downtown, what’s going on?”

 Karen turned from the passenger seat window and looked at her friend.  “You know what, I always liked Rick.”

 “Rick who?”

 “Rick, the guy you lost your virginity to back in high school.”

 Rachel started to laugh.  “What are you talking about, I’m still a virgin.”

 “Very funny.”

 “Okay, okay, so you liked Rick.  What the heck?”

 “Rachel, you go through boyfriends like shower water.  You’ve got to stop this.”

 “It’s not my fault.  Is it my fault that I want a man, and not a wimp or beef head athlete who looks at himself in every mirror or dark window?  Why can’t men look good and still be men?”

 “Maybe you should consider why you attract guys like this and maybe you should consider why you always end up telling me why a guy is a jerk on a Friday night on the way home.”

 Rachel looked over at her friend.  They had started kindergarten together.  They lived through college, fights, boy friend break ups, and family matters.

 “Karen, what’s going on?”

 “Tom asked me to marry him.”

 “What?”  Her question coming out air, opened mouthed and genuinely shocked.

 “You see, you’re shocked, I knew you’d be shocked because who would want to marry me, when he, who ever he is, could have someone like you?”

 “Whoa, whoa, where did this come…”

 “I’ve had five boy friends Rachel, five.  One hand full…”

 “Don’t say it like that Karen, really…”

 “Shut-up.  Really shut-up.  Grow up and come down off that glass hill you are living on.”

 “What?  Glass hill?  What are you…”

 “You’re thirty-three years old.  You work out, you tan, you travel you learn different languages and you make sure you are really untouchable.”

 Rachel re gripped the steering wheel with her long slender hands.  She loved to drive, she loved to feel the road moving beneath her.  Karen was always on the passenger side.  Always.

 “What do you want me to do, call Rick?”

 “Do you remember his last name Rachel, to ask information?”

 “Sarcasm, that’s helpful, very helpful.  Wait, wait one minute here!”  She glanced into her rear view mirror, a quick glance over her shoulder and changed lanes.  “You haven’t told me if you are going to get married.  Am I invited, I mean if you are?”

 “I need to know one thing.”

 “Okay.”

 “Did you sleep with him?”

 Rachel sped up just a little and changed lanes again.

 “With Tom?”

 “Never mind.”

 Rachel looked over at her friend.  “Hey, your prince will show up someday.”

 “And I’ll be on that Glass Hill.”

  

Sandra K Woodiwiss 2012