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The List Part 1

Store
Stuff for lunches
Snack cheese
Fruit
Tortillas
Peanut butter
Ginger root
Veg saver bags
Sunscreen (at least SPF 75)
Instead cups
Fill Trazodone at pharmacy
Bug spray no DDT
Shiner

To Do
Get back on birth control
Stake tomato plants
Sort Mason jars and lids
Call Martha
Renew library books
30 day squat challenge
Deposit Mom’s check

Living Space
Wood floors
Clean lines
All those damn canning supplies
Apron (“Nothing Beats a Good Rub”)
Alarm keypad
Refurbished rocking chair
Library books
Pictures of sisters, marching in a row
Bay window
Garden outside

Reasons to Live
Cheap pregnancy tests
Jeff Buckley’s album Grace
Therapy
Endless chamomile
Boots in autumn, flip-flops in summer
The sound of sealing jars
Mom
Sue Grafton hasn’t gotten to Z yet

Never Say
I hope he’s doing well
Retarded
You look tired
I never want kids
I love pulling weeds!
Want to hang out this weekend?
Orgasms are overrated
I slept like a baby

Recent Books
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Path
DSM-5
From Margin to Center
W is for Wasted
A Room of One’s Own
Little Birds


Things I Notice About People
Do they have tattoos?
If they’re tall enough to hurt me
Freckles
Do they have piercings?
If they’re tall enough to keep me safe
Eyes
How good they smell
If they look like they can hurt me
Are they David?

Things to Change
No more nightmares
Learn to grow lavender
Start living outside of lists
Learn to like onions
Go back to school
Learn to live with him
 
The List Part 2

It’s supposed to be simple.

Or, at least, that’s what it said on the website about getting rid of Creeping Charlie. Glechoma hederacea. Even the name of the plant itself sounds like a fucking cancer, and I find myself wondering why I bother to dig it out. “Small infestations can be controlled through hand weeding…” I refuse to use a borax solution, although it’s recommended. The thought of putting something onto growing tendrils that they haven’t introduced themselves makes me wince. Homemade mulch, that’s all. Ron from next door – he of the ID necklace and recent cardiac surgery – doesn’t seem to mind the compost smell.

I sink my dirt-clogged garden gloves into the tangling vines again and tug. There’s no reward in this, really, beyond hoping that my lettuce makes it. For the last two months, it’s been me and the droning of bugs that leave mysterious welts on my exposed arms. I slather them in sunscreen before I clap on Mom’s nasty gardening hat. It seems to be working out, for me and the tender buds. I rip up weeds, I lay out decomposing plants and grass clippings, I chew on new mint leaves, and I survey the tiny semblance of order that I manage to make every time I trek out to the rectangular garden plot. I’ve got what passes for a life, at least for the summer.

But my phone rings, over in the shade cast by garage. Why I have the ringer volume up is unknown to me. Seventy-two voicemails. Thirty text messages that get no reply. I’ll strip the gloves off eventually and tentatively press a finger to the screen, see another missed call from Mom.

Have you thought about going back?
How’s the house holding up?
I hear they’re rehauling the requirements for women’s studies.
Do you think you might like to go out to dinner?
Maybe a vacation.

I’m sick of vacation.

The Charlie’s had enough for today, I decide, and stagger to my feet. I’m not a graceful gardener: I don’t wear form-flattering cutoffs to kneel in the soil, I haven’t donned flowing summer dresses to clip a few leaves of basil “as an accent.” I keep my clothes as loose as possible and hide in their folds. The squelching feeling around my toes that follows me to the safety of the carport reminds me, once again, to nix the flimsy sandals for outdoor pursuits. Too late now. I wipe my nose with my arm and head for my phone. A car passes, some teenager from down the street, and I instinctively flinch at the pounding bass line that emanates from the windows.

Martha, my therapist, says that stuff like that is totally normal. It’s to be expected after trauma, she said. We were slouched in the faux-leather chairs that are dotted around her office. We tend to apologize, she remarked, for anything that we consider an emotional reaction. I had picked at the floor-length skirt covering my legs. My mind longed for the newfound safety of the metallic taste of Lunesta and my nightly glass of ice water, David’s height and the span of his hands.

And the dreams.
The Trazodone’s not helping with those, huh?
No. He’s still… He’s rigor mortis. He’s set.
Okay. Let’s keep talking, Emily.

It’s not like Martha can fix anything. I know that she’s not a Band-Aid. She listens to the stories from this retreat of mine into hefty books, exacting lunches, and recipes for green tomato jam with ginger. She waits for the rare days that I steal into her office and recount, in fits and starts, what has led me to the safety of minimalism. Those days are never good, and I take the Trazodone before dinnertime. The clock ticks and settles into a nurturing rhythm while I check the locks and then recheck them. Jeff Buckley and I, alone in the dullness of my nights.

But I need them dulled.

And even as my finger hits my phone screen, underneath the July sun that will shortly become sweltering, I feel the familiar hiccup of fear. It’s a toss-up with me, whether I’ll want to see David’s name emblazoned on the chipped screen. Some days I think I’d scratch every last seedling from the carefully tended earth, swallow the pepper-taste of all that Charlie, just to hear the roundness of his voice. But then it comes back, and it sears me. The crackle of the package, the glaring positive, the press of his lips against skin still unchanged, and where the fuck is he? It could be that all of this gardening connects me to security that’s universal, all of that shit about terra firma and the comfort of gravitational forces. That, however, is too close to the idea of reaching for the original source of wellbeing.

The womb.

Well, anyway, it’s not David. It’s Mom, and she wants to go to dinner. I text her back that I plan on making the first batch of jam of the summer and that she’s welcome to come pick some up. Considering that it’s her old house that I’m renting and she’s the one that’s supporting this hermitage that I’ve enforced on myself, she can have all the goddamn jam she wants. I wander back to the garden, heave up the bowl of baby tomatoes, and head inside.

Martha has me do this exercise sometimes, where I test how comfortable I am with holding out my arms away from my body. There’s usually this weird sensation of not being able to feel my skin. My bones feel adrift within the shell of my frame, and I almost always pull my hands back to tuck them under my armpits.

It’s shock, she said. They feel disconnected, right? Surreal?

I’m pureeing the tomatoes in the food processor when my phone rings again. The number looks like one of the clinic subsidiaries; maybe it’s about the new sleeping meds? I’m anticipating the spicy smell that permeates when the vanilla bean and cinnamon cook into a slow, burbling mass. Okay. I wipe off my hands, feel the numbing stretch of my arm, and touch the answer button. Incredible. A spontaneous reaction.

“Hey,” says David’s voice. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
 
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