Pruning

My Grandmother once boiled a lobster in front of me.

This was after I had already named it Herman.

We had purchased it at the grocery store earlier in the day along with a good amount of Kosher salt. To me, this seemed like a massively obvious paradox. Herman was a lobster. The Kosher ship had already sailed.

She had told the woman, the poor, unfortunate woman whose job it was to pluck live lobsters out of a salt water tank to find a "fighter, as she was always fond of making demands that seemed simultaneously nebulous and obvious. This, too, seemed an odd request of something that she planned to boil alive later that evening. It was as though there was something to be gained by killing the strongest lobster, the one with the most fearsome claws, the one who had dominated his patch of ocean-floor until he fell into one of the simplest traps imaginable. None of that strength would save him. When it came down to it, he would fall into the inferno of boiling water without a fuss, cooked to death in the salt water where he had once lived without any drama.

"You shouldn't feel bad. Their brains aren't big enough to know what's even happening."

For the third time that day, I was entirely befuddled.

How smart, I thought, do you need to be to know the life is being boiled out of you?

****

My mother always hated when my grandmother did things around the house without being asked to do them. It was, she mentioned, a tactic she has always used to put her hosts on edge and subtly criticize them in a way that could not be retaliated against. Who could, realistically, fault someone for unloading a dish washer, waking up early to start a pot of coffee, or drive to Home Depot and planting marigolds (a flower my mother hates, finding their scent offensive and their symbolism morbid and too closely associated with ghosts). My grandmother dismissed this, saying that her family always fed marigold petals to chickens and it turned their eggs the most lovely color of orange. Their meat, too.
-"But does it taste any different?" 
-"No, but that isn't the point."
I ultimately sided with my mother. It seemed like a bad deal for the chickens and, honestly, what house wants ghosts before the mortgage is paid off?

****

I picked my grandmother flowers as she was busy chopping off rose heads from the slightly un-manicured bramble on the side of the house.

They were, plainly speaking, an entirely dazzling shade of blue. The color, I decided, of the sky right before a snow storm but minute and numerous like the scattered bits of unused gems too small to make satisfying jewelry, but none-the-less valuable if for no other reason than their clarity and beauty.

"Those are weeds."

She said this with no judgment nor remorse. She simply identified them without accepting them.

"Where did you find those?"

"In the yard in front of the house."

"Show me where when I finish here. We need to get rid of them."

"But they're so pretty."

"They'll make your yard look horrible."

She said this as she wrapped her fingers tightly around the red-velvet petals of a slightly aging rose. She took no care not to bruise or crush it. She pinched the plush cushion of plant and it splattered like fabric fallen to the floor. Without pausing, she snipped it off and tossed it to the ground in a pile of thorn branches and mint-green leaves.

She didn't wait for me to ask.

"It was dead. I had to cut it or it would hurt the other roses."

It made no sense to me.

"It didn't look dead."

"Look at the edges. They were going brown."

I picked up the discarded head, lovely now in a tragic way, the way that something that has peaked, that only faces the process of decay can look in the last moment of its life that it can claim beauty. After a moment, I noticed it. A small spot on a petal, slightly darker than the rest of the head, a discoloration that would only be spotted by someone looking for an imperfection.

"If you don't want the rest of them to die, those have to go."

She snipped again. However, this time, the browning of the petals was more obvious.

****

As I waited for the school bus the next morning, I noticed the weeds were gone, pulled up by the roots and sprinkled with some sort of powder that had not harmed the grass.

For reasons I could not explain, I thought of chickens nestled in hay, eating petals that would make them all the prettier to the person who would one day cut off their heads.

Werewolves

"Why do you think we are afraid of unreasonable things?"

The girl’s father disapproved of the boy because he was unshaven. 

It seemed innocuous at the time, a silly prejudice reminiscent of archaic standards of judging appearance. Even at 6, I had enough self-awareness to find a loophole when I could. I personally hated dressing up and it was a good nine years before I’d start shaving at any rate. 

I would later come to recognize the first line of that familiar story as “foreshadowing.”

The tale was, as I remember, an old tool. My grandmother had also spun an essentially similar yarn until the ending (which, in her version, included a rather extreme variation). Thusly, I concluded that it was an old story that had, as far as I could tell, been used as a literary abstinence program, ensuring a terror of sexual contact in small children that would last them well into their early teens across Southern Appalachia for generations.

From a logical standpoint, it made sense. We must rationally conclude that virtually anyone could be a werewolf. It was just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time to know for sure. 

In the story, a girl is forbidden by her father from going to some sort of country dance that would require her to walk alone through a small forest. It could have been the dancing, the facial hair, or the chaperone-less walk through a dense collection of trees that set the father off. I wasn’t old enough at the time to understand the full extent of patriarchy or its inner machinations. 

What I did understand is that, defying her father, the girl went to the dance with the boy who, rather carelessly, neglected to mention an unfortunate recurring case of lycanthropy (which could be, I suppose, read allegorically as herpes depending on the reader, as this is the type of story which thrives best through oral tradition). She again makes the conscious choice to avoid using good sense and stands frozen as she sees her date metamorphose from scruffy bad boy to full-fledged virgin-eating machine. Luckily, Daddy is near by and blasts the would-be suitor/consumer to living shit with a silver bullet. It could, alternatively, be seen as an allegory in staunch opposition to gun control. 

My grandparents had a glistening oak cabinet of hunting rifles and these were the Clinton years, if we’re being honest. 

In my grandmother’s variation of the story, it was none other than the girl’s father who was the werewolf, having forbidden his daughter from going to the dance with the foresight that it would be a full moon and he would not know her, presumably, from any other person walking through the forest at night, practically begging to be murdered. Her suitor is the one who shoots the werewolf dead, who immediately transforms into her father. She, in all likelihood, porks the unshaven boy on the spot for saving her ass and her father is given a simple, but dignified, Christian burial. 

It should be noted that it is entirely impossible to read that story without sensing some sort of Electra complex. 

Regardless of variation, both stories left the same impact: anyone could be a werewolf, so be extremely suspicious when people love you. 

As a child, I took my phobia of werewolves to an extreme level. 

I read multiple books at the public library about them and how they could be subdued, cured, or, ideally, destroyed. My research led me to believe that a healthy crop of monkshood in my mother’s flowerbed would be adequate, providing that no one in the immediate family was a werewolf.

However, my mother flatly refused. 

“They’re incredibly poisonous,” she’d said. “And this frankly sounds like another of your strange ideas.” On top of that,  she’d never had any real talent for gardening.

After some basic research, she concluded what she’d already decided: that anything sold locally only by an organization called “The Sorceress’s Garden” qualified immediately as a “strange idea.” Even, she reminded me, if it weren’t one, some child had died not terribly long ago from eating them. 

Well, that’s just great, I’d thought at the time. One stupid kid ruins it for everyone else. 

No monkshood. Nothing to ward off werewolves except for a silver cross that I found at a yard sale for 75 cents, and, after I discovered it was magnetic, I realized that you get what you pay for.

No werewolf was ever warded off with a bargain. 

***

My sister asked me today, “Why do you think we are afraid of unreasonable things?” as we stared at plastic bottles washed up on the banks of a river so polluted that she’d once been put on antibiotics simply for falling in it.

I denied a belief in such things. 

I didn’t mention any of the long list of fears: ghosts, darkness, robots with emotions, commitment, serial killers.,,,

The most infernal fears, I think, are the things we don’t really believe in. 

I’m privately inconsolable. 

I watch the depths of discarded things, innocuous and never missed, tethered to the pitiful shores of a now-grey river whose bottom you cannot see even in the shallowest of parts. 

I wonder what became of the cross, another artifact I abandoned with plush toys and night lights and suddenly wish I had it. 

It won’t clean a river, but, I realize, my thoughts shifting from the pitifully churning beer cans and bottles of Dr. Pepper, how little good fortune a werewolf needs to find you just one time. 

Atonement

“Hope you had a great Yom Kippur! ;)”

I reread the words, remind myself with a free-falling sense of humor that there are probably not many Jews on gay bear social networks while internally kicking myself for deleting my JDate profile.

“It’s not really that kind of….”

I stop myself and question if it is worth the time. Is it ever worth the time to explain a holiday where the appropriate felicity is “I hope you have an easy fast?” Realistically, how many non-Jews get lessons on tactfully acknowledging High Holy Days? Also, what was with the ;)? Is that supposed to be sexy? Did someone just wish me a sexy Yom Kippur? 

I delete the message. If I elaborated further, I would open myself up to the obvious: No. It had NOT been an easy fast. In fact, I could not remember a worse fast. Explaining the details of it would be an immediate end to any lines of communication with a practical stranger. “No,” I would answer if the barriers and constructs of society permitted elaborating in detail about the fast. “In fact, I spent a good portion of the day looking at pictures of carrot cakes online and I’m wearing white after Labor Day.”

I can smell the absolute divinity of vegetable fajitas cooking from a restaurant next door. It is tempting and the time left could be measured in minutes now. 7 minutes, in fact. For a moment, I debate it. It was close enough, right? Not to mention, I hadn’t done anything this year especially terrible. How much atoning could I REALLY need to do? I hadn’t treated anyone with cruelty. I’d made charitable donations. I’d avoided ritual satanism for yet another year.

“I’ve been good enough,” I think. 

Good enough, I determine, to warrant a burrito bowl with 4 minutes to spare before the fast technically ended. 

What did I need with atonement? How do I right a wrong with a figure who, if it were truly there, had failed to atone in too many ways to count? 

“Who is watching?” I internally grumble in frustration (the message remains unanswered). My secularism was, for some reason, not compelling enough to warrant breaking the rules. 

Anti-intellectualism. Completely pointless sacrifice designed to make people feel needlessly inadequate.

Yet I do not move. 

I know why I stand still. The idols are gone. The temple of my mind has been stripped of anything of value. All that was holy and might fetch a price had been sold to blog posts, drunken rants, and poems scratched idly on bits of paper, but still I stood in an empty room that I knew would never hold anything again. 

My less-than-average misery, my private, common melodrama of a day without food had not numbed me completely. It is, truly, a beautiful evening. 

The moon sat perfectly round (edible as peppermint cream) against a deep-blue evening sky speckled, I realize for the first time, with needle-sharp flecks of silver starlight. The air was mercifully cool, animated in brisk gusts that chilled yet kept my mind off of stupid, delicious guacamole and margaritas (bottled and less alcoholic than mouthwash, but I was in no position to grouse). 

I concentrate again on poetry to distract myself from indulgence. 

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”

I knew before it entered my mind that it would be the poem to get me through the next few moments as I tried to simultaneously appreciate the comfort of nature in a moment of self-imposed frustration. 

Mary Oliver. 

Never in any crisis of my life have I been without Mary Oliver. 

This very poem had been read the Saturday before at a funeral where I burned in the sun by the East River and tried to fathom a world without someone I loved very deeply, tried to imagine with both hope and fear a day where I managed not to think of a beloved friend who disappeared, who ceased to exist in a split second. 

“You do not have to be good.”

But who could be good in days like this?

You do not have to walk on your hands and knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

Forty years, but who is counting?

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

But there are worse things than atonement. 

You do not have to be good.

But perhaps we do.

There are words, I remember, a ceremony before one breaks the fast, confident that s/he is even with a silent parent who is miraculously absolved from such formalities. The tone should, I have read, be one of light-heartedness and celebration.

I didn’t feel especially festive. 

“I’ve been good enough,” I say again, hoping that it would be true.

Perhaps, though, not so good at all. 

Meanwhile the world goes on. 

“Who are we kidding? You didn’t atone for shit.”

I see the chest of ice flakes with whole peppers in them (fat, green as earth). I think of biting them, chewing them whole, stem and all. I think of the burn, gradual to extreme, the flaming irritation of pepper seeds that could burn away anything left inside of me that is not purged and starting over.

I look one last time at the unanswered message and type quickly. 

Thanks. It was a humdinger. We closed the place. 

Send. 

 I open the door to a symphony of smells on a hot, holy grill welcoming me back from atonement.