I have to stop smoking so much. I think of knitting. I think of the wool I will buy. I think of everything I will make with the wool. The tapestry I will finish of a girl wearing a blue ribbon in her hair and her dog sitting next to her. This image makes me smile. It makes me happy. As much as the man makes me happy. Well, smoking it has become a dirty habit. A filthy habit that I cannot seem to get rid of and all I want is to see him as I wait for him in the courtyard or the terrace. He is all-important to me. He is all I want in my heart but there has to be room for science too and the fourth industrial revolution. There has to be room for my research. There has to be room for the politics of the moment to become as visible as the imperfect self. All I want is the man. All I want is the boy who lived next door to me and asked me to play hide and seek. When we kissed for the first time, I thought he could feel my inexperience like rain falling on the pavement when you have left home with no protection whatsoever, such as a raincoat or an umbrella. All I have is the hours. Hours like the baking of bread, or birthday cake, or children.
Summer is here boy from Mars. You blow my mind every single time I look at you. I see everything. I try not to see everything. I am falling in love. I am falling in love. Sleeping in a chair by the window. I thought you were standing over me. I thought that I could feel your presence. Thought I could feel you watching over me during the day, and watching me from afar when I go to the shops for groceries, or bobby pins, or to look for wool. You don’t smoke, it comes from memory or it comes from desire or it comes from childhood, my childhood friend. I turn my head away and blow the smoke out in expert rings of cigarette smoke and I think of snow on the mountains in Swaziland, in Switzerland and in Austria. In the beginning this is how we talk to each other. Slowly and tentatively. I reach for his hand. He reaches for mine and we sometimes sit in companionable silence. Saying nothing for an hour, and then the hour stretches into two, and I go into my elderly parents’ kitchen and I carry cups of steaming hot black tea with two sugars to him. Does this make him happy, I wonder, and is this enough for him, and doesn’t he expect more, he is of course a man now, not an adolescent, not a boy, not a child? There must have been others. Other women. Beautiful women and then I feel that my heart is breaking, I can’t breathe and not for the first time, when he looks at me and smiles, I can’t breathe, when he gets up and asks me a question, or makes me laugh, or tells me a story, and can I handle myself around him. He loves me. I love him. Are we ready to embark on this adventure called life together? I am still afraid of the dark. As a child I was afraid of the dark. It terrified me like lucid dreaming and cognitive behavioral therapy and men who said to me in my late thirties, come and keep me company.
There is electricity in the air as he takes my hand. I can see it in his behavior, his body language, isn’t that what the clinical psychologists says, instead I look into his eyes. I am staring at him, giddy with joy and happiness. I can’t stand to look away. He is my church. He is my shopping mall. And all I want to do is touch base with him. Hold his hand in my hand. Hug him real close as we part, feel the texture of his jacket with tenderness and the pull of vertigo in my fingertips. He is important to me. I think he knows that. I think he does. I haven’t told him that in so many words, only so many ways. Only in actions. Only in words. I am writing to him now. Always on the phone waiting for it to go off, waiting for the bread and the rusks to come out of the oven. I experiment madly in the kitchen as I experiment in the darkness. Summer is here and it feels amazing on my skin. My entire body tingles as I slide into the bath and I think of him. I think of him mostly. How amazing he looks. I think of his eyes, meeting mine as he listens to me. I listen to him in return.
To his innovative mind, his forward-thinking ideas that sober me; the coward and the fool inside of me. Do you think you could ever come to church with me, do you think you could ever pray with me, and I say, perhaps tersely, or am I imagining that I sound like that, to this boy from Mars? We grew up together. We were childhood friends. He invited me to play hide and seek. What do I remind you of, I ask hi? I want to know. Our childhood, he says in a heartbeat without blinking. And overnight he has become important to me. Overnight, I have fallen deeply, truly, madly in love with him. I have waited and waited and waited for the right pilot to come. The right pilot to make intelligent conversation. He had no money. He was a history teacher who dreamt of writing plays like Athol Fugard. I know Lisa, I said once. I know her in passing. He looked confused. Lisa? He said. Am I supposed to know her, know who that it is, he says, pensive and confused and I feel as if I have cast him aside as if he is some toy that I have become bored with? I am not bored. Far from it. I am a woman in love. And in that moment that has now come and gone all I want to do is protect him, all I do is love him more. I think of his beard as perfection.
Think of his lips and mouth on mine No, darling love. She is Athol Fugard’s daughter. He lives in Los Angeles now. I think, I think, I think. I kiss his hand. I take his hand in mine. I kiss his face. I kiss his lips which are warm and sweet and taste like Glen tea. The man kisses me back, unhooks my brassier strap and runs his hands up and own my back. You feel good, he says. He takes a step back, meeting my gaze, making eye contact, making me feel safe and wanted and adored and most of all desired, and he says, you are beautiful. The man says while he reaches for both of my hands and I look a sight, or a mess with my brassier bunching into my chest, you were always beautiful, did you know that. And something inside of me is turned on like never before. He has been with women. I have been with people. I have been with men but not like this before. Never like this. It felt as if I was coming home. It felt as if I could call him sanctuary. His hand in mine felt steady and cool in mine. I could feel something turn inside of me like a revolution. I felt myself at night thinking of him, and then the impossible would happen I would not, could not fall asleep without medication. I lay awake the whole night thinking of him. All I wanted was to lay in his arms and feel his arm around my waist. I want to know what love is. I wanted people to show me. I wanted them to come to me and hold my hand, and tell me that everything is going to be ok, that I need not worry.
My people they loved me. My tribe, well, that they supported me. What is an overachiever. What is a perfectionist. What do people do besides make love and have babies and raise their family. Tell me please. Tell me quick. Look at my blue wrists. Look at the blue veins on my hands. Tell me that you love me mother. Tell me that you love me father before I destroy myself in the fire. I let the cancer burn. I let the black veined leaf burn that I balked at and turned my head away from and it felt good to do that for the most part. But the vision of her, the apparition of her red fire engine lips, her dark hair falling down over her shoulders, over the middle of her back like silk has always stayed with me. She was mother. She was mother. And in the bedroom, she was lover and wife and belonged to my father. Her name was, I sometimes forget, but it will come back to me soon enough. There were times when she made me feel as if I was the most important person in her life, and then I wasn’t. I was replaced by laxatives. To be the best she taught me, you had to be thin. Model-thin and it was a woman’s lot in life to take laxatives.
What do people do, I would ask her. I don’t know. Ask your father, she would answer. Drifting away from me. It was my father who hovered. Who hovered in the passage of our house, of my childhood house? It was my father who took me with him everywhere he went. I was made to feel wanted by my father. I was not made to feel wanted by my mother. There was always a lack of energy there. There was breakfast and toast. There was the congealed yellow sun of the egg making a smiling face up at me. I badly wanted friends but brought nobody home. One day as I was playing outside as they had a screaming match. The usual. Although usually I could predict it as clockwork. We sat outside and I was as numb as a gun. Listening to my mother’s voice going higher and higher like an orchestra. I don’t love you anymore, you know. I don’t love you. She stripped the beds. She broke her wedding crockery in the passage. In the face of my mother’s madness and sabotage and destruction he became calm. I became a gun. I became the bullets in the gun. I put a helmet on to shield me from her gaze. But of course, she could not see me. She had as usual forgotten I was even in the picture, playing with my friends after coming home from school. Your daughter. No, Miranda, our daughter. Your daughter, she said hissing.
The daughter who looks like you with the high forehead, will she ever be beautiful. I want a child, Thomas. I want a child. Give me a child, and my mother collapsed and cried and cried. I want another child. A child who looks at me the way your daughter looks at you. She hates me. It is because you give her enough reason to do that, Miranda. Can we try, can we please try to have another child. And after that, came my father’s patient voice. We could hear their entire conversation unbeknownst to them. I will stay. I will stay, Thomas. I am sorry. Yes, Miranda, you always are. Let’s make love, Thomas. Make love to me. Make me forget about this never-ending day. I am bored. You work. You go to work. You see people. I imagine you see beautiful women. Answer me, Thomas. The children, you forgot about the children, Miranda. And I looked at the man and everything mattered from his eyes, to the touch of his hands. You think too much. Don’t think so much, said the man, his arm around my shoulders. I am falling asleep, love. I felt something letting go of me inwardly. As if finally, the insane life and a sane life was had met in the middle, as if there was a coming together and I rested my hand on his shoulder and closed my eyes.
