Loryn's 2nd week draft (late late late)

Dear Friends,

I'm afraid that my draft, in its continuation, has actually gotten worse! No--I guess I just see that it's changing direction and is no longer about what it was about before, maybe? Perhaps I still don't know quite what it is about-- I thought it was going to be about my mother in some way-- but it's drifting away. The "Insanity" section was meant to evolve into another section about my mother's vanity and exercise addiction (at 66!) and the impact this has had on me. But now it's sort of about something else, so I'm not sure I'll keep that thread. I would so appreciate your ideas. 

Now, on to your pieces! Can't wait! 

Cheers,

Loryn

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Presently,

I am standing by the large, industrial style window of a discount bridal shop on the top floor of a graying, everyday building on West 21^st street.  The black plastic pane is covered in dust and cold to the touch. I am leaning toward it with one hand on top, trying to breathe, trying to get some air.  I do not want to be crying, but I cannot seem to stop; I am unable to catch my breath. Despite the noise in my head, all of this is happening in a quiet moment, and for the most part, I am going unnoticed. The building tops across the street are covered in sky-dirt and graffiti.  From the ground, I know this block pretty well, but everything looks different from up here.  Where is my mother?

The Story of my Birth

My older sister, Taryn, was a couple weeks shy of her second birthday when my twin sister and I were born. For my mother, this meant being suddenly responsible for three babies in diapers at the same time. For Taryn, I imagine, it meant something entirely incomprehensible. Not quite two and primarily nonverbal, she couldn’t possibly have understood this sudden disappearance of life as she had always known it. 

I grew up in a small town called Potsdam, NY, a college town with two universities right there and one more 10 miles down the main road. Otherwise though, it was small and rural, counting more cows per acre than people. It was a cold, brutal place to live—the brochure might say “nestled in the St. Lawrence valley,” or “snuggled deep within the foothills of the Adirondacks,” but the truth is we drank well water, ate a lot of “ground beef goulash,” and stole our first kisses in hay lofts and corn cribs, surrounded by siblings and cousins. The truth is we wore snowsuits over our Halloween costumes and turtlenecks under everything. Wild kittens, not to mention raccoons, were born inside the walls of our homes and garages. We fought with our parents, fought with everyone, on the way to Christmas Eve mass where we cried openly about our parts in the Nativity play, words punctuated by forced fogs of frozen milk-breath.

In Potsdam, the wealthiest people were middle class, and the poorest people were lacking necessities in a pretty big way. We had one school, Potsdam Central, and one hospital, Potsdam Hospital. They were both on Leroy Street, which ran parallel to Main Street, which was, for all intents and purposes, actually the main street. As kids, we never, ever, knew that we were poor.

Because I was born in this small rural town in the late seventies, I was not confirmed, as an entity, until pretty late in my mother’s pregnancy. Hard to imagine it now, from my place as a 35 year old woman living in New York City, but my mother did not have an ordered sonogram until she was almost 7 months along—an afterthought, almost—a joke—a joke on everyone, because surprise, she had two babies in there, and of the two, one—I—was not doing well. 

Story goes, admittedly shady science, all of it, that my sister was looking pretty healthy, even round; first in line for the umbilical cord, she had taken more than her fair share of nutrition and was clocking a pretty normal birth weight, even for a singleton. The gift of life had not been shared though, so to speak, and as the second baby, I was “failing to flourish.” Not only that, but also, in theory, I was a boy. I was to be born a tiny, underweight boy, quite possibly retarded, at that. Happily my parents decided to love me anyway and to name me Lorne, after my mother’s stepdad.

My mother discovered that she was in labor when they told her as much, the day she went in for a late-term check-up and was instructed to head straight to the hospital.

Feeling nothing, she went to the grocery store first, and then home, laden with shopping bags. Intending, for the most part, to pack and get on her way, she decided to take a little bath instead, give my father a call at work after she’d gotten out had had a chance to get herself together.

She wanted to shave her legs one last time before giving birth.

An hour or so later, 2 freshly purchased spring melons ripening on the kitchen counter in her home, my mother casually walked into the hospital and gave birth to a healthy baby girl—my sister, weighing in at 7.5 pounds—and then to me, 45 minutes later and also a healthy baby girl at 7 pounds even—kicking, screaming, red in the face. The nurse on duty, a friend of the family, insisted that my name be changed to Loryn with a y, in acknowledgement of my actual femininity. 

To this day, whenever my mother tells this story, she turns her head thoughtfully to the side and says that she was never able to feel me inside of her until after my sister was born. Then, she says, in that 45 minutes of lag time, she felt me stretching all my limbs out like the arms of a compass. “I knew right then,” she says, “that you would always be the kind of girl who preferred to be alone.”

Weather Up, Brooklyn

I arrive first and stand alone outside the whitewashed storefront with no sign, waiting. I don’t know how to say his name, which starts with an R sound. I am sweating, and my shoes—patent flats, infant pink—are new and pinching. I have on a short blue dress with a neckline that is neither deep, nor shallow. I see him walking toward me, recognize him as the man from the pictures, and stand still, observing his approach. I am holding in my stomach. He walks nervously: long strides, arms swinging stiffly, straight down, front and back, front and back with every step, like a parade, benevolently marching. He is wearing jeans-and-a-short-sleeved-button-down shirt. We shake hands, talk about the heat, and go inside, where it is too crowded for conversation. Luckily it is so hot that we find empty seats in the garden, which is also white. There are tiny strands of colorless Christmas lights hung along the fence and I look at them a lot, letting my eyes lose focus, watching as the lights lose shape and blur into dandelion furs. My eyes are water; I feel private. I order a fancy vodka drink with citrus and a sprig of herb; he gets the “surprise me” special--you choose light or dark colored spirit, and leave the rest to the bartender. He chooses dark.  

An hour later my crossed legs are slick with sweat.  He seems interested in hearing about my trip to India, but I am thinking only of this sweat.

The place is cash only, and he pays. I am impressed by anyone’s ability to have more than twenty dollars of cash in pocket at any given time. I’m also unsure of how to say his name, though I feel certain it begins with an R sound. I blush. I am often embarrassed.

  

Insanity

“Insanity” is a video workout series claiming life-changing results in JUST 60 DAYS. It is called Insanity, presumably, so that if you are doing these workouts at home in your spare time, you can tell people that you’re doing the “Insanity” workouts and they will assume that you are not only totally insane about fitness, but also really fucking fit, and thereby, in hundreds of other life-ways, superior to anyone who is not currently in hot pursuit of getting rrrr-ippped, themselves. Or, perhaps, because it is insane.  I’m not exactly an authority on the subject.

According to the manufacturer’s product description on Amazon.com, when you do Insanity,  “Your personal trainer, Shaun T, will push you past your limits with 10 DVDs packed with cardio and plyometric drills with intervals of strength, power, resistance, and core training. No equipment or weights are needed, and you don't have to be in extreme shape to do it. As long as you're ready to dig deep, Shaun T will help you get insane results in just 60 days.”

Re-reading that description now makes me want to go back to the Amazon.com page immediately and hit “Add to Cart.” It also makes me wonder if that isn’t an awful lot of “withs” for one sentence, and who exactly was in charge of letting such terrible sentencery go to press, anyway?

I want Shaun T to help me get insane results in just 60 days.

South Hampton Girls

My mother is in the bathroom. She took the key from the girl up front when we first came in, and they’ve asked me to “go ahead and get started” in the meantime. I suddenly feel the urge to pee, too, but instead I’m taken to the back of the dull shop at the top of west 21^st street and asked questions about my size. Because wedding gowns run about two sizes smaller than street clothes, I am instructed to look for dresses between sizes six and eight. The racks are labeled according to style: “strapless,” “A-line,” “strapless A-line,” and become more voluminous from left to right.  I’m told to start “pulling dresses” and to hang them on a designated hook. When I’m done, they’ll move me to the next aisle over, where there are 4 small fitting rooms with curtains for privacy. In front of each curtain there is a step stool and a mirror.

I’m pulling dresses, mainly according to size and a lack of embellishment, and hanging them on the hook, when a giant blonde toothpick of a woman grabs 5 or 6 dresses from the hook next to mine, holds them high over her head, and says “good thing I work out,” as she lugs them over to the South Hampton girls already in fitting rooms on the other side of the wall.

The South Hampton girls look pretty similar to one another; it seems amazing to me that these two friends are preparing for their weddings at exactly the same time. They are incredible looking. They are tiny little women with long blonde hair. They are standing on the stools, wearing dress after skin-tight dress, changing in rapid succession. This is not the first time they’ve done this; they are not shy; they don’t know anything about a dust-covered windowpane near the back of the shop. The giant blonde model friend is moving like a pit-crew for them as they dismiss size 2 samples—Vera, Marchesa, Celine, Luhillier—one after the other.

I’m watching them involuntarily, watching their breasts disappear when they put their arms up. Their torsos are tan and tight with muscle; they have torsos as smooth as the thighs of seven year olds on summer vacation. They are wearing thong panties, no bras. They do not care much for the privacy curtains, and their breasts disappear when they put their arms up. Their tiny breasts, their tiny arms, their arms.

Mom finds me intubating at the window and tells me how much she likes the dresses the South Hampton girls are trying on; they’re so beautiful; they just look stunning, have I seen them? She wants to grab the dresses they discard and add them to my pile before they get re-hidden among the racks. Hot tears fjord silently down my cheeks without permission.  

It’s my turn. I hoist the bunch of dresses over my head and lug them into a room. “Thank God I work out,” I think to myself.

They are so heavy.

Snap-shot

I only have one good shot, one true picture of him after all this time, where he looks like himself to me—where he looks the way I see him.  Perhaps it is an elusive way to see someone.

We’d been out photographing the beach on a windy day in November, and his hair is windblown. He’s wearing his green-ish grey Swiss Army brand mid-weight coat, his camera around his neck. He’s smiling, but not for the camera.

When we woke up that morning, I said “I wish I still lived by the ocean,” and tucked my bare legs underneath me.  My toenails were painted; I was wearing an oversized white T-shirt.  “You do live by the ocean,” he said. So we went there.

Dreams

In bed next to Raphe, at his parents’ house in North Carolina this past weekend, I dream it all away.

In my sleep, I walk into our dream-stage apartment, the door opening into a disheveled living room with the sofa bed pulled out, the TV flickering static. Raphe is propped halfway up against pillows on the right side, the blankets pulled up. My twin sister, Michele, is in a similar position on the opposite side, but with an air of rush about her. She is pulling a shirt over her head.

It’s as if I don’t get it right away, am swimming underwater in one long, last minute of before. Bubbles pop and escape as I kick to the surface. A young girl appears too close to my face, blowing dandelion furs like dust against my skin, a pleasant fracture around my eyes, hollow laughter as she fades from sight. 

“Have you two been fucking? You’re fucking her? You just fucked?”

A slightly shorter moment now, the heart rage space where noise should be, excuses, denials. No, yes. They have been fucking each other. Raphe says so. Michele finishes dressing, leaves. Somehow, there’s a missing element. Awash in adrenaline, intoxicated, flooded with clench, something screams inside my ribs. Breaking fascia, broken blood. Strands of tiny blinking lights and quiet; he is breathing normally. The TV is on.

In Scene Two of the dream, I take off my engagement ring and place it in his hand. I am so mad that a part of me wishes I wasn’t giving it back to him, that I was taking it off, but keeping it somewhere, hidden like a stolen line of verse, kept secret, purposeful infidelity, hushed away. Not like this. It drops into his hand and he is nonplussed. What is going on in my chest. Something is wrong in my chest.

There’s no noise, nothing in return. No answer. Echo-call. again, Again, AGAIN. again, Again, AGAIN.

When I wake up, I’m sorry that it’s gone away; I need it back. I am acutely aware of my inability to survive the loss of this. I see the ocean, and know there is no raft.