voodoo economics
She didn't become a poet to change the world. (Or maybe she did. Grey sky, blue sky, skies of green and orange over I-95 flickering behind her eyelids; maybe she's a poet because words are her weapon and she always came in last in PE. Except she didn't, not really, because she ran track and beat all the boys, and maybe that's why she wields her words like knives.)
Looking out over the ocean, she digs her toes into the sand and wiggles them. She mentally crosses that off her list. (Also: watching the sun rise over the water, eating breakfast- burnt toast, a banana, and a pot of white tea- on the lanai, wearing the sarong Peter gave her in Thailand, rhyming Miami- with "salami," but only when said with a skewed Brooklyn accent and accompanied by an oddly profane hand gesture.)
The sand is warm beneath her feet, hot and sharp and tickling. The water soothing.
Beach, reach. Sand, manned. Ocean, motion.
It's just something she does, rhyming, something to pass the time between lying down and falling asleep. Like counting sheep, really, or naming all the bones in her body (from metatarsals to cranium, always, and never from head to foot). It's just something she does, like making lists to cross things off, like (watching people die and letting their ghosts rattle around in her head until the words bleed out) caring too much and asking all the wrong questions.
There's a woman in a Jackie O pink Chanel suit staring out over the surf.
Tabatha wants to meet her.
The woman waves. Into the sky, up at the birds, she waves, and Tabatha smiles back.
"Come into my lair," said the spider to the fly. Tabatha waves.
The woman, with her absurd pink suit and large black sunglasses, has hair the colour of the sun and the grace of a Shakespeare heroine as she glides across the beach. Tabatha holds her breath and counts to seven. The woman keeps walking toward her, too something to be real, and the whole day turns into a Bunel film. The sky just the wrong shade of blue, the beach a ballet, and then the woman trips. Falls.
And the day becomes real.
Sharp.
Tabatha carries a bag with her everywhere, an old World War II Army utility bag she bought on e-bay, filled to overflowing with pens and notebooks and maps of the places she hasn't been. She'll leave the fading Miami one (circa 1951, discovered in the back of her mother's junk drawer) in a gas station restroom on her way out of town.
An old band-aid tin that she keeps filled with antiseptic cream and a few bandages always migrates to the bottom. She digs for it and clutches it in her hand as she runs toward the woman.
Yells, "are you okay?" (Doesn't add, "surreal Jackie O woman.")
"Fine, I'm fine," she responds, but Tabatha doesn't believe her. Can't believe her. There's a warble in her voice, something odd and off-putting, and Tabatha keeps running until she's kneeling in the sand examining Jackie O's legs.
There's a long thin cut along her shin, and the sand beneath it turns pink to match her skirt.
"Do you need to go to the hospital?"
"Oh, no, I'm fine, thanks, just bleeding to death a little." Then she waves her hand, twice, and adds, "You can leave now."
"I can?"
"Yes." It's an order, from a woman obviously accustomed to getting her own way, but Tabatha's never been the type to blindly follow.
"That tone of voice may work on the hired help," she says, "but I've taken on the President of the United States, and I'm not scared by your frighteningly accurate Abby Bartlet impersonation."
The woman blinks. Begins to laugh. "I'm Lindsay Bluthe-Funke, and you have just got to meet my mother. C'mon, we're meeting for lunch in an hour; plenty of time for me to stop home and change into something a little less bloody."
The stair-truck they drive in does little to dissuade Tabatha from her growing belief that she's somehow in the middle of an extremely lucid dream. Or an acid trip. That she's quite probably dead and burning in the fires of Dante's inferno.
Lindsay's mother is prattling on about Nixon. Drinking martini after martini, eying her daughter's shrimp cocktail like it's the antichrist, she intones, "Seriously, darling, he was our best president. Just look at what he did for the economy." A pause to finish off another drink, and she continues, "and your father never had to go to prison while he was in office."
Tabatha smiles. This is just a Fellini dreamscape.
And there's a brush against her leg, a soft panty-hose clad caress, and she swallows the last of her merlot in a rush.
She wants to say something about the children living on the streets- no food, no water, no model home to camp out in until Daddy gets out of prison. But if Toby taught her nothing else, it's that there's a time and a place and some people will never listen. (Know it all, schmow it all. Listen, glisten. Sky, fly. Jail, bail, nail, fail, flail.) She wants to say something, anything, but Lindsay's foot is caressing her shin and her voice refuses to come.
So she stands up, spilling water into her salad. "Umm, excuse me. I need to freshen up a bit." (Cliche, cliche, cliche, her mind repeats. If you were a poem, you'd be a limerick. "There once was a girl from Nantucket...")
Lindsay is following her. Tabatha knows this without turning back.
She's in the middle of a French film, and the beautiful stranger is following her to the restroom. She glances down, surreptitiously checks her fingernails.
And when she opens the door, the ladies' room is empty, of course, and she heads straight for the handicapped stall in the back. Lindsay's shoes echoing behind her, too loud in the silence of the cold tiles and one dripping faucet. So they play in counterpoint- step, drip, step, drip- and it all feels like a ballet gone wrong.
Which is when the stall door slams. Lindsay kisses like the end of the world, and her fingers are weapons. Tabatha's moaning something about goddesses and death and "oh, there" when the door opens and they fall to the floor.
"Darling, your daughter's here; you may want to touch up your lipstick before heading back to the table."
Her mother walks out calmly, too calmly, and Tabatha begins to laugh. They dress hurriedly, and Lindsay stuffs her pantyhose in a trash bin on their way out.
Back at the table, Tabatha orders another glass of wine, two, and waits for the skies to fall.
Morning, again, and the sun rising over the ocean like happiness.
Tabatha clutches her map of Miami, her bags, her keys. She can see them, out of the corner of her eye, these bickering men and women traipsing across the sand in Chanel and Lacroix and their Armani suits rolled up to the knee. Lindsay talking to a man, a man who could be her husband or her lover or her brother, and her mother pointing, always, at nothing. She can see them, and they are there, on her beach, and she wants to tell the world about this broken aristocracy and she wants to run, both in equal measure.
So she runs. Walks. Gracefully, carefully, turns the other way. Her car is in the lot.
She's three miles out of town when it comes to her, full and filling and eternally incomplete, the poem. The one she'll never publish. The one they'll discover posthumously, a hundred years from today, stuck in the back of a rusted out 67 Chevy.
Squinting, the pink Jackie O woman counts the waves and sighs, it begins.
She's not sure how it ends. (Yet. Then some things never end, and maybe this is one of them.) She crosses number twelve off her list- have a fling with a rich blonde- and number thirteen- start a poem about her that you'll never finish.