Texas Ghost - Part I

I was sweating in the evening sun as I hefted the second bag of cat litter up into my arms, and began pouring.  There were still two good sized oil spots on the driveway.  I made a mental note for the 10^th time to only park in one area, so my leaking Plymouth truck could make just one big mess instead of several messes.  As the sun set over the cedar trees outside of the house, a drop of sweat ran down my neck and the middle of my tank top was damp.  My cat, Simon, suddenly bounded out of the bushes, making a beeline for the house.  He stopped short at the driveway and stared at the piles of cat litter.  “Don’t get any ideas,” I said.

The truck was one leaking fluid or rattling part after another, but I didn’t have the money for anything else.  The last issue was the starter, which left me stranded in the parking lot of The Saxon Pub, which actually sported a gigantic statue of a fully armored saxon in the parking lot.  I’d been been shooting pool all evening.   Which led up to why I was about to quit pouring cat litter and pretend like I could cook.  I owed Shawn dinner for replacing the starter.  Not that he really wanted anything in return.  Saving a damsel in distress was what he lived for.  Of course, he did take the time to admonish me for being out in a bar by myself shooting pool.  It wasn’t very ladylike, according to Shawn.  I’m sure I did a lot of things that didn’t fit within Shawn’s definition of ladylike, but he seemed to be willing to entertain the notion that I might change.  That those unladylike parts of me could be sanded down to fit just like the wooden planks he sounded down when he built his little cottage out in the woods.   He was still checking me out.  And I guess, I was checking him out a little.  Otherwise, why did I have a bag full of shrimp in the fridge that I had to shell and de-vein, even though the extent of my seafood cooking in the past involved opening a can of tuna fish?

I flopped the plastic bag of gray, slippery shrimp into the sink and planned my attack.  My roommate, Debbie, handed me a Lonestar beer.  Since moving to Texas, I’d taken up beer drinking with a vengeance.  And wearing cowboy boots.  And saying y’all.  I filled a pan with water to boil for the pasta, and began to shell the shrimp.  

“So, did you see how jealous John got when Ed bought me that drink?” she said.  “I couldn’t believe it!  He looked like he was going to explode!”  Debbie took a sip of her beer, and pulled her curly brown hair up into a ponytail, fastening it with a rubber band.  “He didn’t see that coming, I’ll bet,” she said in a satisfied way.

I decided I didn’t like the smell of raw shrimp, but my pile of shells was getting bigger.  “Yeah,” I said, “but what does he expect?”  Actually, I knew exactly what he expected.  He expected Debbie to return his calls immediately, and to not protest when he disappeared for a couple weeks because he met some big-haired, tight jeaned, loud girl, which, most of the time, was what happened. 

Debbie pulled at the label on her Lonestar.  “I think he gets it now.  I mean, I can’t wait around forever!  I’m going to be thirty two!  Thirty-two! she shrieked. 

“Well, if he doesn’t get it, then definitely don’t wait around,” I said.  I washed my hands, the shrimp all peeled, and read over my recipe for lemon caper sauce.  The capers and the shrimp had been seriously more money than I expected, and I was wishing I’d just taken him out to dinner somewhere, since it probably would have been cheaper. 

“I know”, Debbie said with a little whine, “but I love him, I really do.”  With my back to Debbie, I rolled my eyes.  “And” she said, “I want to have his baby, and I need to do it soon!” 

I opened up another Lonestar, and squeezed two lemons to get as much juice as I could into a small mixing bowl.  “You don’t want to have his baby and then have him acting like a jerk, though”. 

“I know,” Debbie whined.  “I just don’t have much time left.”

Debbie always sounded as though her biological clock was on fast forward.  At twenty-four, I couldn’t relate. I didn’t think I wanted kids at all.  I wanted to be a good pool player, I wanted to learn guitar, I wanted to be in a rock band, and I wanted to make enough money to buy a new truck, or be able to fix my own so I didn’t end up spending $30 on shrimp dinner because someone had to save me.  Unfortunately, all of my goals were going about as well as Debbie’s goal to marry John and have his baby, which was not good.  And like Debbie, I was getting a little tired and frustrated.

It was a couple months ago, in May, that Debbie had introduced me to
Shawn.  We’d spent the day speeding around the bay in his motorboat and yelling things to one another that we couldn’t hear over the noise of the boat.  He had brought a cooler full of Coors Light, and Debbie and I added our Lonestar and we drank beer and baked in the sun all day.  There wasn’t much room on the boat, so we pretty much stayed still and I tried not to get bumped off into the water.  Shawn was a big guy, with beefy arms that looked ready to lift logs or heavy animals or something, and beefy hands that looked right curled around a cold beer, with the other thick hand adeptly navigating the boat to skim slightly to the left or to bounce against the wake of some other boat, causing me to feel certain I would be tossed into the water.  “Yo!” he would shout at us, “Y’all ready?” and then would toss us a cold beer from the cooler.  This would have all been fine and good, had Shawn not insisted on bringing his bull mastiff dog everywhere with him.  So, in addition to the three of us, there was his massive beast, that insisted on sitting up next to Shawn.  This meant that the dog’s copious amount of drool was whipped back from the wind his in face, and into my face.  The dog was sitting on my side of the boat, so Debbie was spared this incessant rampage of saliva, but I received it full on.  By the end of the day, I was drunk, sunburned and covered in drool.  After we docked the boat, I pulled out a cigarette, which caused Shawn to remind me that smoking wasn’t very ladylike.

Debbie had told me that Shawn built his own log cabin.  He and his dog lived happily in it.  But I guess Shawn was looking for Miss Right.  And I guess, he was thinking it could be me, if I stopped playing pool and smoking and drinking, I suppose.  I was petite and blond, so I figured that was appealing.  And my truck was always breaking down, so that was probably a plus too.  I pulled out romaine and spinach leaves, and started running them under the faucet.  I placed each leaf on a plate covered by a paper towel, and then patted it dry with another paper towel.  I thought about Shawn’s big beefy arms.  I thought about what it might feel like to be wrapped in those beefy arms.  Sometimes I looked at the sheer strength of him and wondered if I would feel stronger just by being around him.  If those arms were around me, would I feel more solid, less like the ghost that I felt like most of the time, the ghost of who I wanted to be, things I wanted to do, but could never make happen, but instead, would I feel my edges sharpen and become clearer with those other arms around me?  If there was one thing Shawn had, it was a certainty of who he was and what he valued and he wanted.  Me?  I was just a ghost.

The kitchen smelled of lemon.  I grated some parmesan cheese into a side dish, turned the burner simmering the lemon and caper sauce to low, and removed the cooked pasta and shrimp from the stove.  There was no time for a shower, I quickly added on another layer of deoderant and slipped into a short white sundress that showed a fair amount of leg, but was casual enough that I could be barefoot in the house in it.  It was sexy without looking like I was trying to be sexy.  I brushed my long blond hair out, and swept it up into a clip.  July in Texas was too hot to have anything on my neck, although by the later evening, it would be perfect outside.  The sun would set and the cicadas would sing and we could sit out on the porch like Debbie and I did most nights, and breathe in the cedar trees and look at the stars.  I had lived in downtown Austin for the first two years I was in Texas, but when I moved out to the countryside, I was shocked at how many stars I could see.  Sometimes, as I drove along Bee Caves Road out to Debbie’s house, the moon would hang low in the sky.  Once, I pulled over and sat watching it, huge, yellow and magnificent, like an opening to another world, calling for me, drawing me toward it.

Ruminations on Cake

I have always hated cakes.  When I was growing up, my mother, who was a fount of domestic creativity in all respects, used to make me birthday pie instead of cake.  Usually, I would request chocolate cream.  Once I remember a chocolate mint cream pie, and once I remember a fluffy coconut cream pie, like some kind of divine, edible cloud.  My favorite was the bucket of dirt.  At my 5^th birthday party, she presented me with a bucket of chocolate pudding, crumbled Oreo cookies (the cookie part, not the cream filling – one of my siblings probably got to eat all the cream filling), with gummy worms dangling over the edges.  My mother was creative like that.  All the time.  I find my creative parenting skills stretched when it comes to things like that.  Luckily, my child likes cake, although he tends to request rather complicated cakes (a volcano, a dinosaur, etc). 

Anyway, when I got married, I wanted a gigantic wedding pie.  I modified my request to a “pie tree”.  My husband had carved a wooden “tree” from an actual tree on the property on which we were living at the time.  From the trunk, he fastened hand carved wooden “branches”, and on each branch (there were 7, I think), there was a flat dish that was to have a pie. As it turned out, pies were too flat to have the right visual affect, and we went with 7 different cakes after all.  It was a beautiful cake tree.  I have a Martha Stewart style photograph of a little girl in a dress standing in awe of the cake tree.  The little girl later came up to me and told me I shouldn’t be smoking, since it was bad for me.  I tossed my veil out of my eyes again, and told the girl thank-you for caring about me, and lifted my wedding dress skirts and wandered off, taking another drag.  It was not a Martha Stewart moment, but hey, it was my wedding and I was getting really tipsy.

I think what I don’t like is cheap, stupid cake.  I think I’m a cake snob.  I can’t stand the sheet cakes that come from Albertsons that are always showing up for some work colleague’s birthday or bridal shower, or goodbye, or whatever.  And you have to choke down a hunk of what tastes like a dried up sponge with a pile of sugar paste on top of it.  I really can’t abide cheap frosting.  Lard with sugar and food coloring.  It’s hideous.  But you have to eat a piece because it’s impolite not to, and someone might think you’re trying to lose weight and hate you because you really aren’t even fat, and what do you think you’re doing trying to look so disciplined, you bitch, eat the fucking cake.  Or they might think that you aren’t really happy to celebrate their pregnancy or their birthday or their graduation, since you aren’t actually participating in this bland and tasteless rite of passage, and who do you think you are, Miss High and Mighty, eat the fucking cake.  And so I eat the fucking cake.