Ocie Bridwell
TRANSGRESSION
Ch 1.
Sourness fills the air when the tide is low in Petaluma. It becomes more pungent as one closes his proximity to it. The stench floats heavily in the fog in the evening after the rain clouds clear and the temperature drops twenty or thirty degrees and the raincoats come out. Exhaust pipes spew, dissipating illusions of warmth, as cars accelerate from stop signs, traffic lights, and railroad crossings. A few winos push cold carts in their torn gloves, their noses rosy red with whiskey. Day laborers wait for their carriages, passing the time by wandering in front of gas stations, lounging on corners, and leaning against walls. In the playground children don’t play in the sand boxes; and if they dare use the slides, drops that cling to the slope of the plastic shell welcome their bottoms.
Germaine walks to school clasping his mother’s hand and he can’t feel her. The tears running down his cheeks carve through the bright pink, leaving white lines in their wake. The air is heavy with moisture in the morning and evening and when the fog burns off even the sun’s rays are heavy on the gentle, exposed bodies. Germaine takes long strides for a child. When his class walks in single file – to assemblies, during fire drills, to class plays, or to any special event that requires the uneven discipline of a single file line of fourth graders – any onlooker can see the carved cave he walks in. Germaine has been crying because it is winter now and everything moves slower and is heavier.
Lucinda doesn’t see her son’s cheeks or the white lines that traverse down or his bloodshot eyes because she is looking at the other parents. She sees Hank, with whom she had a brief affair, and blushes inside, takes a breath, and manages to keep taking step after step after step. As they close in on one another, the sour smell is in the air and Lucinda shoots a smile and Hank smiles blankly back, for his son’s sake. Neither spouse knows of Hank and Lucinda’s affair, Hank being quite the two-faced piece of shit his business partners think of him as, and Lucinda’s husband having recently departed. Lucinda’s muscles tightened as Hank passed and she squeezed Germaine’s hand and Germaine’s hand hurt because of it. After the children were settled and the parents left class began. The parents paired off while walking back to the parking lot, their conversations lending themselves to the indulgences of the stronger will.
As Germaine settled into class by peeling off layers to accommodate the warm classroom, Lucinda walked home, her breath quick and fast and short. Her cheeks grabbed their bones, creating two depressions on either side of her face, and she looked like a skeleton: the life was sucked out of her. She took fast careless steps, and this was how she always walked and her stride wasn’t long. Her feet accompanied the lazy pitter-patter of the light rain. Her hair pulled back with a headband to tame her bangs, she looked as if she was ready to run, but she didn’t have it in her. And her sneakers, dwarfing her bony calves that appeared slightly larger courtesy of a layer of spandex, made her look clumsy as they skidded along whatever surface she was walking on. She breathed hard puffs of steam through her nose and down and it swirled where it slammed against the slope of her neck and moved down her small breast. She did not walk Germaine to school when Rodney was alive. She was not the mother some of us have, who can pick up where someone has left off – carelessly or not, abruptly or not – and blossom a flower regardless of the environmental conditions.
Ch 2.
Germaine sat, feeling the warm air from the heater touch his skin and drown the cold that tried to cling like kindergarteners to their parents on the first day of school. But Germaine is older now and he smiles as the blood in his fingers nose and toes warms with every beat of his heart. He doesn’t remember clinging to his father in any explicit, embarrassing manner. He does remember, however, his father’s hands and their strength, size and warmth, as his father would walk him in the summer. The days were longer in the summer and it was light out while they walked; not like now, which was dark and without feeling. Sometimes they would race the last block or so and after Germaine won he would spin around, arms raised and hands clinched into fists, and his father would catch up and hoist Germaine above his head. His father would trot the rest of the way, Germaine posted in the crow’s nest of the mainmast, and the young victor would breathe in the sweet, sweet air in silence the rest of the way with only his father’s steady and sure steps acknowledged by either of their senses.
Germaine sat in class, the tips of his fingers still cold.
“Today, class, we will begin our lessons in science, beginning with photosynthesis. Now, who knows what photosynthesis is?”
A voice dared the silence, squawking, “It makes plants green.”
Everyone laughed.
“That is correct, Lawrence,” the teacher said, “The green tint of grass and leaves is a result of the chlorophyll and the process of photosynthesis.”
The laughing subsided to a murmur and then to nothing at all.
-----
During recess Germaine and Helena walked the dirt track that began near the basketball courts on the east side of the playground, encircled the grass field in a half-dome laid flat on the ground, and met the cement again on the opposite side by the tetherball poles. Every year on May Day parents and faculty would decorate the poles. Their tethers and balls removed, the poles stood bare until the parents arrived with ribbon and streamers, and then they were Maypoles. The classes marched out one at a time to dance the Maypole and the children laughed and danced and looked into the eyes of one another as they celebrated the fertility of the earth. Hand in hand, Germaine and Helena walked, and they were filled with the type of romance only fourth grade children can have. The kind which one can taste and smell and feel; it is thrust into the chest like a bullet, and spreads like fragments of lead pumped through veins and into the heart where it accumulates, filling the bottom and sitting as a heavy weight. They walked with this weight in their breasts and the playground attendants looked on, oblivious to their slight hunch and caved-in chests, unaware of the abounding love which radiated out from the far away point of the yard.
-----
Lawrence was pushed up against the wall of the bathroom; an octagon divided in half, each side to each gender. It was dark and damp in there. Green tile lined the entirety of the floor and ran along the walls at the waist, the whole perimeter, to allow hosing off at the end of each school day.
“You think you’re smart or something?” snapped Nat.
Lawrence kept his mouth shut and his eyes open and breathed fast through his nose.
“He scared right through his teeth.” another voice tumbled. And the boys surrounded Lawrence, their joints slowly moving, like a ship in to dock.
-----
On rainy days class would not be let out for recess. But, because three classes shared the same building – with a common middle ground – Germaine and Helena would still be able to hold hands, even though they had different teachers. It was on these days that Germaine was least happy, because the weight of the winter would seep under the doors and through the windows. A cold breeze would tickle the necks of the children, sitting snug in their seats, and as Germaine sat he could feel the weight all around him. Raindrops clung to the outsides of the tinted windows and very little of the weak natural winter light shown through and onto the desks and faces. In the classroom the time of day didn’t matter: morning, noon and evening were the same light filtered through a heavy window. Everyone moved slower, covered in a molasses of wintertime existence.
10:10 and it is time for recess. Whole classes stir, individual waves crashing and colliding in the bay. Pencils go away into their holds, teacher retreats to her cup of coffee, girls’ hairs fall into the stream from a drinking fountain, and destined lovers meet in the middle ground where there are no rules. Minds roaming free in a prairie.
Germaine and Helena sit on a couch, their hands buried between the cushions, the joining of flesh and sweat. Lawrence and a few other children play with colored blocks on the ground, and both Germaine and Helena watch with nothing to say. Shrieks and laughs from around the building fill their ears but do not penetrate their kind of meditation.
“Lawrence, you aren’t doing it right,” Germaine begins, “My dad says you have to start wide at the bottom so it doesn’t fall as easy. Otherwise when--”
“Said,” Lawrence interrupts.
“I’m tellin’ you, unless you have a good bottom, when you try to move it, it’ll just topple over.”
Nat walks up and then crash, it’s gone and I have to start over.
He snaps at me, “Didn’t you hear what Germaine was sayin’, Lawrence?”
And he just walks away.
Recess is over and Germaine and Helena part. They let go at the hand – they don’t dare kiss in front of anyone – and go back to their walls and heavy window winter classrooms.
Ch 3.
“…Longer the days are now that I’ve left you, not by a choice of will, but because of one mans duty to his fellow and to his country that has given him you. Paying my dues with blood I will return debtless and whole, with a sweet cheek to caress waiting for me, if our Lord wills it. I have not known this feeling before, this weight upon my shoulders, and I do not know it now, but I am familiar with it. An enemy with a face is distinguishable but just as tough and dangerous as the faceless desert…”
Lucinda did not give herself to her husband so much as he took her. Like a hawk. After spotting his mouse a mile away and swooping down, he flew away with his claws digging into her flesh, feathers floating to the weeds below. He was powerful and his grip was a band around her, keeping her arms close to prevent her from any independent movement. Her terrified body was frozen in a block of ice, her heartbeat growing slower; her skin against the ice, hard and cold; her hair wet, heavy, and tired. His attempt at wooing her did not subside for the duration of his life, not even when he was thousands of miles away. His letters were the heaviest in the mail, and they had a distinct, infectious feeling when she picked them up. Handling the letters was like handling an old rug; they were awkward and had a tendency to dirty everything they touched. Their dust found its way onto her fingers and then onto her blouse, then onto her napkin and finally into her mouth where it settled at last. She coughed and coughed until it finally released. Back into the air it flew, later settling in a small pile in a discreet corner, waiting. The letters were heavy but she could not let them go, as much as they tired her arms.
The day he left she breathed in and for the first time there was no sour taste. She was free and her arms moved. She cleaned the windows, rearranged the furniture, and changed the bed sheets. And when Germaine walked into the house after school and asked what had happened, Lucinda did not respond – she smiled towards him and then went back to work. Scrubbing the floor, beating the rugs, scrubbing the stove, beating the pillows. After she packed up her husband’s clothes and entombed them in the garage, sealed duct tape, she breathed in the sweet candy air and she was finished. It was her house and the air that floated through it was fit for the Gods.
Germaine looked at his mother and she was different. She hummed while she cleaned and her hair was loosely pinned in a bun, not enclosed in a handkerchief like she used to wear while she cleaned. Strands fell onto her flushed cheeks when she bent over; strands lay lightly over the collar of her shirt, like a lover on a chaise lounge. She moved swiftly about the house and Germaine started to worry. When she saw him she moved towards him and he shrank. She took him in her arms and held him close.
“Hush, my darling. Settle. We are okay, everything is okay,” She whispered.
And he relaxed some.
She sang a soothing song, her breath warm and soft against his hair, “I’m just rearranging. Things are different now, so I am just trying to make everything easier.”
His muscles tightened as she spoke, afraid of the change that awaited his wide, cautious eyes. “I don’t want it different. I don’t like it.”
He was quivering and coughing and choking. His eyes were watering and Lucinda held him close and there was nothing she could say to ease his muscles or his mind. She laid her head on his and shed tears for her son.
She sent Germaine outside to play on the sidewalk where he could breathe and escape the remnants of his father’s grip. She checked up on him every so often and found him hard at work at something. Drawing in chalk, riding his bicycle, digging in the dirt, and building a fort of pillows. None of the other children came to play with him; he was alone with his mind. Thinking and learning and growing and smiling. Frustrated and beaten and tired and scowling. Finally Lucinda called him in for supper.
“Mom, we have to take a picture of my drawing on the sidewalk. The rain will come and I don’t want to forget it.”
-----
Sometimes Lucinda woke to the deep mid-night sound of V8 engines humming idle in their driveways against a backdrop of rain. Everything but the piercing taillights of the idle cars was gray. The town seemed to lie at the base of a volcano that erupted every evening with the setting sun, scattering a gray ash out and over the town. The ash settled onto the town like a blanket over a cold body, and all of the curves and contours were draped, smooth and rounded and softer. Rain came in the night to wash the ash away and to prepare the town for its next day.
Lucinda stood at her back door looking out through the raindrops on the glass of the door. They sparkled in the moon’s light; the whole world sparkled at night under its blanket slowly dissolving in the rain. She stood, looking and thinking. For her, the day brought nothing but the night; it was the night that brought about the events of the day that shape our lives into the round beaten saucer that sits under the stars, collecting rain water for no apparent reason.
She scooted through her kitchen to bed, stopping along the way to lay her eyes over her son under the blankets and to hear his soft wheeze in the cold of the night against the ticking of the rain on his bedroom window.
She lay in bed listening to and thinking about the night and what the night would bring.
She whispered aloud, breathing out, “Everyone says ‘what the day brings,’ but it’s nothing. The night brings everything to us while we sleep alone in ourselves. When our bodies pull energy from the air and leave it dull. The sun is a trigger that causes the reaction in us… it is just a trigger. The night holds everything for us.”
She lay in bed, the sound of the idling truck cutting into the dead of night, and she drifted off while the rain slowly ran its pure hand over the town.
Ch. 4
Germaine’s walk home from school begins on the side of a green hill that overlooks a large playing field and a Baptist church. A dirt path carves down and small bodies litter the length of it, like ants scurrying through their passages: building and digging and feeding. Germaine walks alone because Lawrence’s parents make the cross town trek to pick him up, and he refuses to ride with Helena and her parents since they forbid any physical contact between the two children. They have forbidden the contact since they found the two in Helena’s back yard playhouse “playing doctor,” as her parents put it, as if the two did not know exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. Lucinda took no action regarding the matter. She did not exercise the notion that Germaine might have been corrupting his counterpart, nor did she subscribe to the belief that children were the least bit innocent – she was a woman with a vivid imagination as well as memory, and her days of innocence were often at the forefront of her vision into the past.
The heavy winter sun hung low over the crest of the hill and at the point of the roof of the church as Germaine peered back towards his school. The silhouettes of large oak trees blocked out the sun so he could stare back and see the orange-red, heavy winter sky. The sky bled and dripped onto the hillside where the sharp point of the roof of the church cut like a razor blade into the heavens, its pure, dark blood diluted in a wash of swirls and spirals.
-----
Germaine turned the corner onto his street and came back towards his house and towards the sun. The market was farther than his house, but not so far, and now he had a candy bar clenched in his hand and chocolate seeping out from either side of his mouth where it wasn’t quite sealed tight. The wrapper would go in the drain and he would jog inside to the bathroom and rinse himself. He knew his follies and tried to protect against them as best he could: if they could not be prevented, they could be masked.
The low sun shown on Germaine and, under his grip, the candy bar oozed over the wrapper and onto his hand. He walked slower and could not catch his breath that suddenly left him. The corners of his eyes filled with red and black that crept inward until all he could see was the middle of the road in front of his house and the red sunlight and the black shadows it cast. There was a lone clump of black that was not a shadow. “Gal!” he gasped.
He breathed harder and dropped the melted bar that was dripping down the inside of his long sleeve shirt. It splattered and bled into the pores of the concrete sidewalk, sucked down, feeding the cold winter. Germaine could not see anything but the lifeless clump in the road that cast a red, thick creeping shadow in all directions. He stepped onto the grass that lined the edge of the sidewalk near the curb and stumbled but regained his footing. He stepped into the gutter and, overcome with nausea, dropped to his knees and crawled three or four feet into the street. His palms left chocolate marks where he touched the hard pavement and he reached out, weak and blind. He lay outstretched five feet from the carcass of his cat, Sir Gallant, and could not see anything but the clump of dark fur and the red shadow that it lay in.
-----
As a cars locked tires screech against all force of inertia, so did Germaine wake from his melancholy slumber. He lay in bed and a washbasin sat on his lamp table, a cold rag floating within. He stood up and placed his feet on the cold ground. The lights were off and the past-set sun’s light shown throughout the room. It was bright, but barely, and everything was cast in a blue-gray light. It was dull, like powder had been tossed about the room. He walked around the bed to the other side where the basin was. He licked his lips and tasted the dried sweat and tears and the salty remnants of earlier in the day. He plunged his hand down and grabbed the rag and wiped his brow, then his face, and finally his arms. The blue light shone through the window and against his bedroom door. Through the cracks of his door the orange light from the hall glowed, and his door appeared apart from the wall. He opened the door and the orange of the hall as well as the sound of the kitchen flooded the room and he breathed a sigh of relief. His mother was making dinner; light piano music bounced down the hall from the parlour. The drying water on his arms and neck gave him goose bumps and he shivered because of them. When he got to the kitchen he stood for a while before his Lucinda saw or heard him.
He saw her aglow in the warm light of the kitchen. Their house was unique from many others in the neighborhood, Germaine had noticed. One way was the way the kitchens were set up: so many houses were cold and dark with cheap wood and vinyl, florescent lighting; along with those came a moulded plastic marble particle-board laminated top that melted under the heat of a pan. Once he had burned a perfect ring in a schoolmate's counter while they were making macaroni. He had insisted, since he knew no other way, to boil water and then add the macaroni, boil the macaroni and drain the water (the way he did with his dad in the summer while Lucinda was out running errands), then place the pan on the counter-top while he mixed the cheese, butter and milk. A small stream of smoke rose from the pan straight up into the grasp of the kitchen's lone fire detector and the alarm sounded. His schoolmates’ mother ran in panicked and scolded the two for doing something so dangerous.
"You could have burned yourselves!" she exclaimed.
Germaine calmly replied, "But I've done it with my dad a million times."
"You should have just used the microwave!" she exclaimed again.
"I don't know how" Germaine replied.
"What kid doesn't know how to use a microwave?!" she further exclaimed.
"We don't have one in my mouse, my mom says they're bad for you."
"They're a whole lot safer than burning the house down, that's for sure!" she was out of breath and sweating, "Loll could have shown you how to use it, you should have asked. Ask before you do something in someone else's house! Where are your manners young man?! Who did you bring over Loll? Come on, we're going home"
"I'm sorry ma'am" Germaine whispered.
Loll's mother took him home.
Lucinda happen to glance over her shoulder while she was chopping lettuce with her dripping wet hands for salad. Under the warm light, leaning against the counter waiting for the fresh chicken soup to cook down, she saw Germaine and his red eyes and cheeks, and the tears that ran down them, soaking into his already wet-from-the-rag night shirt. She ran over to him and hugged him tight and kissed his forehead.
"What are you doing out of bed sweetie?" she asked, "My, you're burning up!"
In between heaving and choking on his tears and memories Germaine balled out, "It's so bright in here mom and dark in my room, I'm scared. I want dad! I don't want macaroni and cheese for dinner, I just want daddy!"
He cried until he couldn't remember why his mother was holding him. His hair was wet and he didn't know why. He broke her grip and saw that she was crying as well. Her cheeks were red like the fire engines that rushed through town almost daily. Only fire engines brought help and resolution, tears were just a salty wet clinging to the skin.