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Being with Georgette #19

Rick Mallery10 Comments

Do you like my tulips?

He’s gone out for his long walk along the river and left his laptop open for once.

I could set the record straight, but why spoil his fun. Or yours! Or mine too, when it comes right down to it. I read these little stories and they are so much fiction that I forget I’m the Georgette he’s writing about. He has such a fascination for anyone with that name!

When I correct the inaccuracies in his stories, he just tells me I should make my own story series called Being Georgette. His other Georgette already took a shot at that and gave up. Apparently I was dominating her stories too.

I’m really not what he paints me to be, but I’ll play along as long as they say it seems to be helping him.

***

Some people ask me what it’s like to be the famous Georgette from his stories. I say I’m not the Georgette from his stories. I’m my own Georgette, and am famous in my own right.

They always reply: “More like infamous.”

See how he manipulates things?

He’s the one with the secrets you wouldn’t believe. But you won’t hear any of it from me. I’m his protector. He lets enough of himself out through his hints and suggestive situations and somewhat naïve narration.

***

I’m not so flighty. I’m really not. But he’s such a challenge to be around. You don’t see him between the stories. That stubborn silence. That fixed stare. That lifelessness. You just want to scream to wake him up, and when all you get is that innocent, gentle smile, followed by: “What is it Georgette?”, all you can do is fly away as far and as fast as you can. I have my own life to live.

I return now and then. Not out of duty, but out of our deep kinship. I know him better than he knows himself. And he would probably say the same about me. At least he intimates that in his stories. Or maybe I just read that into his stories.

***

I’m sorry I don’t describe things like he does. How he turns a jar of pickles into the closest thing to a confession he’s made so far. For me a jar of pickles is a jar of pickles. I look around the kitchen here and can tell you about a knife, a refrigerator, a sink, and a flickering fluorescent light that he refuses to replace. I see a rack of drying dishes and a whole chicken thawing on the counter. He’d tell you he’s making chicken ballotine, but I swear he has no clue what that is. He just read it in a book somewhere.

You see, nothing interesting develops out of such descriptions for me.

I asked him about these descriptive tricks once, and he said he just writes what he sees when he closes his eyes and watches the movie unfold. He said sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.

I don’t see a movie when I close my eyes. I just see blackness.

***

My garden. I could tell you about my flowers. But for me, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you’ll have to make due with the picture of my tulips. Around here, they bloom in May. I prefer to be where they bloom in February. But here I am.

***

He knows things. What he lacks in people skills he makes up for in intuition. He says maybe his problem with people comes from what he intuits of them. I tell him I think he is right, but he suspects I don’t know what I’m talking about.

He knows I have a secret or two that I can never tell him. I feel him probing me, trying to provoke me through these stories. He doesn’t know how much it would kill him to the ends of the earth to know one thing especially, and that is why he will never know. And neither will you.

***

If he were writing this, he would have ended with that last sentence. I sometimes catch on to his literary tricks. But I’m not interested in being so dramatic.  When I finished my coffee on the front porch, he was just coming up the highway from the river. So I have a little time to sign off and wish you a good day.

Sincerely,

Georgette

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Reading Ulysses in Montana #597

Delving Yardbarker8 Comments

The free parameters were no longer free, but they were cheap–cheaper by the dozen, or by the tens as spoken in metric-speaking countries.

Regaining solid footing, the feet entered into competition with the late-arriving souls, lost on their return from Machu Picchu, the Panama Canal having gone to the ball game for a brief tour of duty. Corresponding rules of particularly proper rank harmonized with the layer of crystal in the distal colon, around three o’clock in the evening. Injected seas into the parapets of offence caused plenty of trouble for the partial parameters differentiated from the colorful mutt on Saturday morning cartoons. Miraculous weather and innocent doubts abound in the outfield under the spectatorship of the Suez, at three o’clock in the evening.

Water stroked the shore with an isle of corn plantations until the plaster lost its buried knees aloft.

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Being with Georgette #18

Rick Mallery12 Comments

 

Being with Georgette #18

Georgette said, “Look, the moon.”

The full moon reflected off the wide, lazy bend in the river out on the flats south of town. The lone remaining span of the old steel bridge cast the shadow of its trusses into the flow of brilliant moonlight.

I drove to the end of the new concrete highway bridge and pulled the truck onto the wide shoulder at the bridge head. The fishing access parking lot below teemed with trucks and headlights and men milling around.

“What’s everyone doing here?” Georgette asked.

“Fishing season opens at sunrise.”

“Let’s get up the hill before the moon moves.”

***

The moon had moved by the time we reached the gazebo at the top of the hill, but it had moved to a more advantageous view from that vantage point. It flooded the river with light.

Georgette sat at a picnic table and said, “When is sunrise?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“Can you make a fire?”

“No.”

***

Our third-grade teacher, Mr. Turner, had jumped from the old steel bridge on St. Patrick’s Day. Steel bridges and leprechauns always remind me of the Mr. Turner and the old battle axe who took his place the rest of that school year.

Georgette snored. Her head was in her arms crossed on the picnic table.

I shook her and said, “Let’s get you home. You have school in a few hours.”

She stood and looked at me, then she looked at the moon and then back at me. “I don’t like what that place did to you.”

“There was no place.”

“You’ve been gone almost a year.”

“I went to my own place.”

“And you didn’t write me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I wrote to you every day, but I didn’t know where to send the letters.”

“I’d like to read them.”

“I burned them on our birthday.”

***

We crossed the fishing access parking lot, now lit by the growing pink light of dawn. Fishermen stood on the river bank waiting for the sun to peek over the mountains.

“There’s one already fishing,” Georgette said.

“The game warden gets a head start.”

***

Georgette climbed into the truck and gave me a clumsy kiss as I held her door.

“What’s that for?”

“No one else would have gotten up so early to pick me up.

“Your parents would have.”

“But then they’d know where I was all night.”

“They’ll know anyway.”

“I’ll tell them I was with you.”

***

When we rounded the bend in the highway near the garden center, the silhouette of the mountain range loomed before us.

Georgette let out a barely audible gasp when the first rays of the sun broke over the crest of the mountains.

She said, “It’s like the signal of a fresh start, a new beginning.”

I hesitated a moment too long before saying, “And it happens every day.”

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<< Story #17 | Index of Stories | Story #19 >>

Originally published May 9, 2021

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Reading Ulysses in Montana #8

Delving Yardbarker13 Comments

Harold heralded the hounded mouth of Flemish faces, unresisting one idea for another.

Bunches of flowers bunched up in hunches of bananas laid bare by the hare of Haverstrom Circus–elephants included in carnal throstle. Morning nudged at begrudged judges of Bournemouth, and old men tendered their pennies for a roll of the dice. Ignorance to the contrary, the pastries bamboozled pure joints of mutton and sharp fibers of etymology as prim as a pram. Friars of gold and silver, that is. Warrants of opposite kinsmen singularly availed themselves of Woodcock gin, blowing their weekly salaries on austere humors of state, having come from softer climes.

Yellow stockings heralded Ginger’s memories of Harold, but Walloons thought better of it.

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Reading Ulysses in Montana #83

Delving Yardbarker8 Comments

Like I know the hairs on the back of my hand sticking up for the poor and downhearted railroad from the station at the end of time to the roundhouse of last year’s chaff.

Chalk walked into a bar and said, Hay, who put that bar there? Hay said Hey! out loud so everyone looked at it as it pointed slowly at the trailer full of hay making its way down the highway, the hay highway. Good grief laughed, but bad grief said, Good grief, why do you have to do that every time? There was total silence, like in a movie just before a bomb goes off. Then a bomb went off, and everyone–Chalk and Hay included–said Hay! we don’t know whether to call it good grief or bad grief.

Like I know Charlie would have a cow if Lucy jumped over the hay diddle diddle.

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Reading Ulysses in Montana #663

Delving Yardbarker7 Comments

Nailed precursors of empty foghorns frittered away their apple-a-day until the doctors went out of business.

Fog hats, on the other hand, footed the bill for a neck of pheasants in full throat with the day of deliberate deliberations coming regarding the mess in the courtyard, but the mess in the barnyard was left undiscovered until the country of travelers’ bourns bore fruit of the next generation. Migrations were up for grabs, but the gauntlets gathered garlands and laurels of canyons in their mighty fists, and furious boughs and frivolous cows emerged from their long winter of ecstasy with their dignity intact but their honor in tatters–according to the zebras, that is–but the optometrists had been delayed at the border, so one cannot judge too harshly.

Making amends brought amens to a close, and the tailor’s closed clothes closet bespoke for no one.

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Being with Georgette #17

Rick Mallery20 Comments

The wedge of darkness framed by the cream-colored door jamb and cream-colored door meant nothing to me for many years–other than indicating the passage to the basement below.

Then yesterday Georgette asked me to take the basket of jarred pickles to the basement.

***

The light bulbs flickered when I switched them on, and then at once they went dark with a pop.

I descended the steep steps clasping the basket of warm pickle jars to my chest, slowly doubting the wisdom of storing the spare light bulbs in the basement.

Without incident I found the workbench and next to it the shelves lined with jarred pickles. Georgette wouldn’t let a summer pass without putting up a dozen jars of pickles, but why she never eats them is beyond me.

The light bulbs had disappeared. Or been moved. So too had the spare flashlight.

My eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that, aided by the slim light from above, I could put the jars on this year’s shelf and take a jar from last year to the basement couch. And there, crunching on last year’s pickles, I remembered another dark basement, another slim light from above, and another voice joining Georgette’s in the kitchen.

***

Georgette said, “Because he’s cracked, that’s why.”

Georgette’s mother said, “He’s been like that since the two of you were born.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“It never bothered you before.”

“He’s charming when we’re at home,” Georgette said, “But he needs to leave me alone at school. You know how the other girls talk.”

“The other boys too.”

Georgette said nothing to that. I could feel her blush from all the way down stairs.

***

“Don’t eat all the apricots,” a voice said nearby.

I froze.

A small lamp turned on, flooding the basement with a dim, shadowy light. Georgette’s father sat in his recliner, his headphones in his hands. The arm of the record player lifted and swung out of the way for the next record to drop onto the turntable.

I said, “But they are peaches.”

“So they are.”

Rows and rows and shelves and shelves of glass jars full of apricots, peaches, pears, strawberry jam, and pickles lined one wall of the basement.

“I don’t know why no one eats them, but Georgette’s mother can’t let a summer pass without putting up something or other never to see the light of day again.”

I screwed the lid back on the jar of peaches and put it on the side table next to the lamp. Then I climbed up on the workbench and out the basement window onto the damp grass outside.

The lamp went out in the basement, but the light in the kitchen remained on, with two silhouettes on the blinds talking back and forth at each other, the shorter one gesticulating wildly.

I was more careful after that about sneaking into their basement to spend the night on the spare sofa. I learned to wait until the lamp went out and a third silhouette appeared on the blinds before letting myself in.

***

I searched again for the light bulbs, but found my old turntable instead and a lamp that had caught my bedroom curtains on fire because I had removed the shade to wear as a hat for Halloween.

I plugged the lamp in and it instantly flooded the room with a dim and shadowy light, casting the baseballs, footballs, and basketballs on its shade against the walls, against the shelves, against the shelving unit with six dozen jars of pickles, a dozen minus one on each shelf. The minus one accounting for the one jar I eat when putting away the next year’s jars.

I put one of Georgette’s records on to play and ate another pickle.

And as I lay on the basement sofa, dreaming about peaches, I wished I had a pair of headphones to hold in my own hands. 

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<< Story #16 | Index of Stories | Story #18 >>

Originally published May 2, 2021

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Reading Ulysses in Montana #426

Delving Yardbarker6 Comments

Ample samples of unscattered ampules amplified the daily needs of a murder of crows counting black leggings in an ambush of lemmings.

Ginger said I am not afraid to forego standard punctuation. George said what. A dozen canaries harried the postman–having had to ring thrice four days in a row–on his way to the forum of hippos at the hippodrome of Hippolyte. Parasites persist in the effulgence at the intersection of civilization and culture in the coroner’s affair of lollipops and despair. Desperate measures call for time outs with four yards to go in a cloud of mighty dust mites coughed up in an ecstasy of gold, digging for a dozen lifetimes because the shipment of bean bags had run amok among the mockery of pigeons.

A game of corn hole notwithoutstanding, the judge declared Ginger the winner despite her collection of mispronounced punctuation, and George was sore amused.

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Reading Ulysses in Montana #574

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The tryst in Trieste was a treat for sore feet having walked across a frozen Lake Constance in a leaking row boat all along the watchtower.

At the end of the befuddled mud puddle of muddled mutants, Papa cast a line across the river and into the Garden of Eden. The observations of honored furniture became the operative activity in the days before all concern over and under the opposition to justice and rule of flaws in the architecture. Negligence was nothing compared to the complete cacophony of phony phone booths, wearing boots on the wall like a liquored up skunk in the outfield. Tongues of ice and bearers of curses angered the flavor of the month club with wounded conscience and tattered soles of their espadrilles.

Deliverance came with a fee, but the driver stalled at the on-ramp of destiny, and the furniture languished for all eternity.

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Being with Georgette #16

Rick Mallery14 Comments

The red kite rose above the crest of the bluff and quickly flew out of my view from the desk inside the sliding glass door of our hotel room. The kite’s tail remained suspended a moment, jangling its yellow and orange bow ties she had folded out of the stack of napkins from the continental breakfast bar.

My writing stopped of its own accord, and my crutches appeared in my hands, unbidden. However, dragging myself to the door and opening it took my own effort, and was my own achievement.

The air was stagnant, and the ocean but a flattened sheet of glass.

And yet the kite flew higher and higher.

I stopped short when the right crutch knocked chunks of sandstone over the edge of the bluff. Four seconds passed before they crashed against the rocks on the beach below.

She giggled like a school girl. 

Her long, flowing dress fluttered in the same non-existent breeze that lifted the kite.

She had powers beyond my comprehension.

* * *

Her dark, opaque eyes fixed on me with impenetrable mirth.

She spoke, but I heard nothing from that distance.

She spoke again, and I could almost read her lips.

She repeated herself, and I leaned forward. I leaned forward a little too far and tumbled into the blue sky, the sandy beach, blue sky, sandy beach, red kite, and beautiful woman.

I reached for the tail of the distant kite, wondering how long four seconds lasted when falling in a dream.

* * *

I was already sitting up when I awoke with a start. I held her night-time pony tail in my left hand, a finger looped in its yellow and orange bows.

Her dark, opaque eyes fixed on me with impenetrable mirth, and her lips moved silently. Then clearly and distinctly, but still from the depths of sleep, she said, “I know I’ve always been your other Georgette.”

I let go of her pony tail and said, “But I love you.”

“I know,” she said, “That’s what makes it okay.”

* * *

Unlike my original Georgette, my other Georgette only left me once, but that was for good–and there was nothing good about it. 

* * *

In the dark times after her disappearance, that dream of the kite recurred frequently: the only difference being that I always woke to an empty bed. She was no longer there to accuse me, but I did enough of that for myself.

Wherever I am when I find the sun sinking in the sky, I look for a red kite to suddenly draw me tumbling back into her opaque and impenetrable life. But the deepest part of me knows that won’t happen until I fall the full four seconds and wake up with a start in another kind of bed, where I can finally comprehend the full extent of her powers. And her judgment.

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<< Story #15 | Index of Stories | Story #17 >>

Originally published April 18, 2021

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