Where We Make Love in Niagara Falls

Although it’s early afternoon, we leave our hotel in our nightclothes. Jogging towards them, you tell me these falls represent death. Now that we’ve made it this far, we can’t turn back. We look ahead to the tourists. We could be arrayed in green and orange rain ponchos. They wear bright colors in case they get lost in the swirl of water pouring misting pounding from all directions. We want to get lost behind the falls. In our real lives, death stays on the northern border of our country, a shade beyond falling water.

You said there was a cave on the other side of the falls. We could shimmy on narrow footholds and slippery handholds with our bodies fastened on the slick rock. One wrong move, a weight shift, a hand moved too fast slips and we’ll fall from the escarpment dashed. At the bottom, the falls churn water back to sky in a cloud of smoke mist. We slip underneath the falls into the cave.

In the cave, I tell you that I imagined death was a man. A man who drives a black jacked-up pickup. A man who compensates. A man unable to love, to connect, to express himself originally. A man capable of violent vengeance rhetoric. A man who traffics in second-hand sentiments that manifest dark resentments. A man who wears black. Black work pants run down over his black boots. His black shades look through tinted windows. His black pickup careens around blacktop bends littered with roadkill. A man who smashes my skull like a squirrel on the blacktop, roadkill, man kills.

Inside the cave we explore until we come to the abyss. We retreat and you hold me under the falls. I can never love you more. Between the abyss and the death, the cave presses us present. My lips press, you open your mouth to me.

There’s no other time.

I know you took us here because he never took you. You always wanted. You have me, I fill his role. I’ve studied the classics. You fill the role of Venus on the half shell. Her crimson locks flowing across milk white freckled breasts. It’s a ritual dance we do.

Snowflakes linger into April. Mist rises. Water falls from the parapet. It smashes against fallen rocks. It billows above the falls and infiltrates the clouds. It floats on updrafts like an eagle, a bird of prey. A bird that knows nothing else. A bird in the air that searches the ground for life through death. But we are hidden for now behind the curtain of the falls. Death’s scepter will return again and again like water over the falls. But for now it passes. Above the slate river against the sedimentary sky until the two meet on the horizon like my body against yours, yours above mine.

 

Abandon

Why had she so casually left behind eighteen years of memories? Memories that stalk me down the hallway creeping from the pictures she arranged. The eternal present of pictures: births, firsts, vacations, holidays. Memories stored in the flesh of our children and the bones of our house. To get past those memories, I wrote until sunrise. Letters to her.

I wrote until my hand ached like the furious last fifteen minutes of a blue book exam. Like the one I walked out in the spring of junior year to inarticulately inch towards my first night with her. She’d been the match I’d been looking for, but every time advanced she retreated. Maybe it was just the end of the year or the summer plans I half made up to impress her if it was just time.

Mornings now were microwave pancakes for the kids, elbows in the sticky amber of off label maple syrup. Daniel stopped putting his plate in the sink. I didn’t yell. I explained he’d have to walk Reyers home from school. I withheld that I couldn’t bear facing the other moms who would know by now. I stopped counting the months of severance pay I had left.

And so was it just time now or someone else? Her silence left me to conjecture. Another man? There’s difference fucking and living someone. I listed her girlfriends, some were single, but none of them reliable man haters. That left her mother. She’d been saying I was no good. It can wear anyone down. If it had just been the two us, could it have been easier or would it have happened just sooner?

My nights went like this:

“Finish your spaghetti.”

“Reyers isn’t eating his.”

“You worry about you.”

“No.”

“We can’t have ice cream until you clean your plate.“

“Unt-uh.”

Daniel has to eat before he can have his medicine. He has to have his medicine so he’ll go to sleep. If he doesn’t sleep he’ll have an SIB (self injurious behavior). Then I have to restrain him so it’s not worse to himself or Thurman. But Daniel didn’t want to eat the canned tomato sauce. And it was my fault. I was weak. I’d only been doing this for eleven years and I sucked at it. If this is what my life was going to be like now, I couldn’t do it. So I told him,

“I’ll hang myself from the kitchen fan. How would you like to come home from school and see me dead and dangling there. Then you’d wish you’d finished your fucking pasta.”

Daniel looked quizzical. It was an idle threat. He was too innocent. I didn’t meant all that. Why’d it come out?

She called one Sunday morning to pick up some things.  I had let the boys play on their screens all weekend any place they wanted. The house, I realized, was a mess.

“Clean up! Clean up! Your mom is coming!”

I grabbed two hampers, a roll of garbage bags, and their screens. I yanked Daniel by the arm and threw him into his work. Thurman helped too. I made sure we showered. “Scrub, Scrub!”  I shouted as I went through their closets to find something clean, yet suitable for the occasion.

Daniel answered the doorbell and she drew both of them through the house. She played in Thurman’s room first and then in Daniel’s while I circled the island in our kitchen. She was hamming it up like a high school musical audition.

“I’ll text you if I need anything else.” She said to the kitchen as she breezed past.

“Here, I’ve been writing you letters.”

“Ok.”

“Are you going to read them?”

“I’ll let you know, ok?”

I felt this whole time as if I had waited for the last train, watched it finally lumber down the tracks towards me, stood back as it moved through, drowning out any other conversation or thought, seemingly slowing down only to accelerate its way out the station, passing through my life, leaving me stranded again this time without hope.

I took the boys downtown. I didn’t care who saw. We needed to do something. Daniel watched the girl behind the counter spread mint ice cream, chop up brownies, and squeeze black syrup all over it before scooping it up and packing it into a nice bowl just for him. Thurman was thrilled with whatever I ordered and he finished his bowl while Daniel’s melted.

“Look it’s going to get better,” I told him because I wanted it to . “We can go to the batting cages tomorrow.”

He just looked at his bowl melting.

“It’s not too late to pick apples.”

Everything was slipping away.

“That’s ok.”

I hate that ok. That’s his mother.

“No it’s not ok. I’m sorry. We’ll take it one day at a time, deal?”

Daniel studied his sloppy brownie mint chocolate ice cream as if he’d never seen it before as if it was a different kid who watched the counter girl’s every move. He dug in the thick mint of hope with abandon.