But I Am Still A Woman
Squalling into motherhood, and lost things, or beginnings to a bigger work
Sorry I didn’t mean to touch you without telling you. The man in the parking lot says after taking me by the shoulders and steering me out of the middle of the cars entry way. The parrot he was carrying, now on my finger with it’s one clipped wing, and he tries to get it to whistle, but it refuses.
I gasp when opening the mail slicing through the side of my pinky finger, drawing blood. Alive! I find myself in Los Angeles again and the light is tinged its orange hue. The trees are beginning to green. The pears all along the post office wall blooming white. And I know my daughter missed it.
Are you a California girl!? I ask her in the backseat of the cab on the way home in the dark. The planes in a line to land above us. Yes! I AM a California girl! She tells me. And I think of all the late afternoons she and I had spent on this freeway going the other direction, south, towards the beach. The two of us squalling into motherhood and daughterhood, the surf always rearranging our insides.
At my old boyfriend’s restaurant I tell him about the time we took my daughter to my favorite beach in Malibu, and how it was just a few months after she had learned how to walk, and I had forgotten, setting her down in the sand, until 5 minutes later when I was racing to her tumbling under the frigid Pacific and that when I got to her she exclaimed again! And we all laugh, watching him crouch down on his knees to address her. And my daughter who is wary of all men who are not her father turns into him, and later throws a look over her shoulder. And I was waiting for him to mention her eyes. Growing embarrassed for the first time when I mention it. She’s got my eyes. I say when he studies her and then my husband. Her eyes, the two things that have stopped strangers since she was born, from the hospital hallway to the sidewalks in Pasadena. Those eyes! They have exclaimed.
For days I have been trying to get still. So this would be it? My husband says as we cross back and forth over the Hudson River. From one side of the valley to the other. I am just trying to imagine our life here.
And I point out the movie theater, and make him laugh when I say how much time has passed in 15 years, that I am no longer the same person, I am no longer a woman looking to cause trouble. But I am still a woman.
Back in Los Angeles after traveling my daughter wakes up early. The sky not even lit yet. I comb through all the papers on my desk, one night while reading to my daughter I saw my whole movie come into focus behind the book. I saw the way the scenes were ordered and I jumped from her to rush to write them down, and then the paper was gone. and suddenly I remembered I had folded it and tucked it into a book, hoping to carry it with me, to return to it, but now it was just gone. Like so many other things.