Tethered

excerpt from a novel in progress

by Raimer Rugh

Full transparency: In this instance of self-nepotism, Raimer Rugh, who is the editorial director of the Drift & Dribble Miscellany, agonzied, argued and counter-argued with himself for weeks over whether to include this excerpt or not, and then--broken--relented.

It’s on a cloud-free and ordinary day like this when it hits, as if all those years in-between were only for the plethora of insignificant things; empty blue skies and dark clouds testing her, waiting, as if she wasn’t ready for something big. Fate does it like that. Until you’re 16.

She cuts through the woods behind the church—no matter if the Father is watching from the window--rests her bike against the step railing and cracks the wooden door at the small Cape ranch next door, and is met with the thick air of generations of closets and drawers of well-worn and never worn ill-fitting clothing that crowd against her with the weird blanket of exfoliate from lives lived in once-worn clothing. If not for the Two Small Coins Thrift Shop sign and black garbage bags of donations out back, it could be any other home on the street. Every time she takes the three concrete steps she thinks: leftover house, leftover clothes, leftover life. This kind of thinking imobilizes others but makes her strong as she blazes her own way through the world.

She pushes the door open half-way and stops—light blinds a corner of her iris from over there on the top shelf--a shirt-stack glowing in its beckoning from across the room, the steller touch of 93 million miles traveled at the speed of light. It’s almost funny: sol’s gilded destination now a radiance on a neat blouse, the shimmer waiting for Nat, a special spot three fingers to the side of a button where a heart should still be. She opens the door slowly, sacredly—knowing the oscillation of celestial radiation abloom on the other wall to be fickle—so she is respectful and won’t dispel it with an errant thought.

She takes a moment in the transom, holding the door as a privacy shield. Behind it the church ladies no doubt are tucked together under the tiny wood desk, waiting for customers. There are no others so she will have to make their day. It’s not that she doesn’t like sparring with the hens; it’s that they go too quick into the petty for Nat, and following the script for her is not natural. The pollution of the trivial is everywhere—too easy to waste on a life’s purpose, and not how she wants to spend the currency of her moments. She is a proud thrifter in all ways, and has to be, to balance out those that are wasteful.

Lonnie and Genie have been waiting all week for a little back-and-forth, a little parlay with the people: to sit in comfortable shoes flat to the ground wearing hairstyles decided on long ago and blown up and clipped smooth as translucent shells once a month just like the manicured shrubs that tidy up their front yards. It’s how the ‘good’ people do it and they're in agreement. This is their day to volunteer for their church—it’s God’s work and not too hard. Keeps them active. They share a coin tray of pennies, nickels, dimes and a stack of ones. The fives are hidden in a folder deep in the back of the sticky drawer for security purposes. They have faith that their lives are blessed but don’t trust the will of men to stay away from their coin, nor the sons of this new generation. In the afternoon the ladies will each be at their respective homes sipping 4:30 sherries in their favorite chairs (which, they have repeatedly agreed, is perfectly acceptable at their age—the before 5 bit and the sherry bit), and they will dial their rotaries with their arthritic fingers and gossip with each other about the customers that came by that morning. At home there will be giggling instead of whispering.

It's still humming there for Nat, the glow; and the ladies still wait, frozen in anticipation of her stalling behind the door. Nat picks her moment and moves, gaze stabilized. She closes the cut glass knob behind her back, navigates around the tables piled with hand-me-down styles and off-colors—chic fashions of other decades hiding gems—and heads past clothing on hangers still holding the shape of other lives, bulbous at the knees, thin at the elbows and hanging at the seat. And around her, the mnemonics of stranger’s dander thickens the air, last puffs from a generation’s closets that have given way for more expansive walk-ins, vacation area homes that families can no longer afford to keep, closet space absorbed into expansive volumes of cathedral ceilings and filtered sea air. Of course there are the things Nat noticed only the first time and now are wasted space: the tacky trinkets wiped clean to hold 10 and 25 cent stickers; a stand full of black umbrellas and two clear ones colored by alphabet block decals; old SLR cameras with mold-clouded mixed-brand lenses heavy in a box; a Ziploc full of God-cursed butt-ugly yarn; a half-dozen half-used Rolodexes dropping yellowed foxed cards, some filled out with lost addresses; a row of pygmy-sized hats too ridiculous to wear that continue to line the top shelf year after year--leftover from the time of the small heads and their unrefined color receptors.

“There she is,” says Lonnie.

“Like I said,” says Genie.

“Everything half today, hon,” says Lonnie, her gray eyes lacerated into figure eights by thick bifocals. It’s important that she relays this information to the girl, our Nat. At their desk she neatens up yards of lace, fingers on auto fold, careful not to catch threads on her huge rock of a diamond ring that she cups in her palm since as long as she can remember; as if it keeps her Richard alive. She hands the tablecloths to Genie, hunched next to her—and, judging by the moist sparkle under her pale hooded lids, she’s having a blast. She places it on the pile and pats it even flatter with fragile knobby fingers as if she’s dust-whacking a doll-sized carpet and willing the whole stack into wrinkle-free compliance. She’ll make it ordered and good yet—it’s her job for the day, and the exercise will do her good.

The solar spot continues to radiate, churning time, churning up charm, and Nat can’t miss this. She skips her usual smiles and charitable nods as she passes the ladies. Lonnie pauses mid-fold. Genie eyes her friend, cautiously. Nat will give them extra words later, make amends with chipper prattle when she pays. Her fingers move into the gold patch and they glow—as radiance bounces around within translucent flesh—and she wonders how in all her years she has missed this saturated spectacle. She fetches and unfolds the bless-ed crisp periwinkle top that is the focus of the blazing star’s attention and the ladies watch with interest. The touch of it is still warm, more by a magic than the work of thermo-nuclear fusion. This blouse has no dust-feathers floating in its sun column--impossibly--and is as brightly clean as her favorite jasmine soap, adored still because of the way it once moisturized her mother’s marble arms; a creamy parfait plane of white petal and fragrance. And as the ladies peer from the desk at the back of her, Nat nuzzles the fine material that her mother would have recognized as desirable and would have snatched up into her basket, falls into its delicate aroma, into a dream where a bluebird’s pulse once ticked off the moments of her life.

“Why is that there?” Nat had asked at the tender flutter at the side of her neck.

“What are you seeing?,” she asked, always egging on this curiosity of her daughter’s.

“That in your neck.” Nat tapped next to the heartbeat in its spot on her mother’s pale skin. “It’s a bird in there,” Nat grinned in trick-mode, eyes crossed—inches away.

“That’s my weak spot,” her mother countered. She held her finger to her mouth. “Shhh.” Then she took Nat to the mirror on the dressing door to see her own quick pulse and explained, “That’s why we wear collars.”

Nat took this in and understood as her mother watched her. For Nat, thinking was a physical event, a trip from here to there behind grayed eyes. When Nat arrived back she nodded and stated, “Collars are like nests,” in the way that she does when she just knows things: it's up to others to catch up.

Genie watches Lonnie. Lonnie stares at Nat. Nat holds shirt against chest in front of the same mirror, well-used by a decade of questioning looks now burned into the reflection. Her neck is lithe too, but her mother’s was longer—always behind clean stiff collar points and curtained by dark tidy hair. Nat missed the idyll of family life with fresh cut flowers—the cut stem’s grassiness would waft upward as the diagonal cuts were plunged into water. But as she holds material to nose, greedy for more and looking for it, the musk of second-hand store takes her instead to lovely hours following behind her, taking for granted the good days when she had a mother to sidle next to. Could this have been my mother’s? she wonders knowing it wasn’t. She closes her eyes, feeling it. The periphery was always around the two of them, and not important. Always beckoning--that’s how it is to those who notice—but Nat has less use for the edge now, knowing it is only for shifting unimportant events and a place for sad people to hurry here and there. She will not be one of those.

Back then, she followed behind, feeling the same articles of clothing in the same way as her mother read them—filling up on her pride by using elegant hand gestures like mudras--mimicking the same capable finger movements in the way her mother flopped over hems and checked seams, how she drew her tips along double stitching to feel its tightness, and took her mother’s non-verbal lesson on how to pick out clothes that contain the power to alter how you walk, that grace your silhouette with the elegance that we all have access to—with focused consideration if we knew how--and that flip how people treat you in those face-to-face first impressions that propel you onward in the course of your life.

“There’s new belts over there,” Genie suggests even as she knows that Nat is preoccupied. “Well, not new. New to you,” she jokes. Nat doesn’t respond as if Genie were talking with Lonnie.

Lonnie wants to make sure Nat doesn’t miss this. Doesn’t want to be derelict in her job and expects a response. She points, clears her throat, and says, louder: “There’s a red one that’s a beaut. The belts.”

“I had my eye on that one too,” Genie says to Nat’s back, responding to her friend, quickly filling the space in Lonnie’s sense of decorum, saving Nat the embarrassment of appearing rude. They continue a conversation between themselves; something about red and belts that Nat lets go.

Nat’s Caucasian mother was opalescent of soul, as buoyant as her weakness for luminescent fabric and softer in emotion than the lofty pile of her gentle skin; open and amenable. But the way Nat’s birth father was treated--a buck of a brown statue aglow in crisp whites, a man always at a distance—a mirage who dimmed at condescending looks built from others’ fear of his heritage--ignited the spit of squelched vengeance in his wife. While her blood boiled, she stayed within her assigned place of a house-cleaner’s identity—facing unfairness in each of its precisely personal ways—by donning layers of restraint that kept her breath in check. Nat watched as she seethed with stuck lips, de-tongued, fazed-frozen. Until alone, later at home, when she vented to Nat all the invectives she would have hurled had she been born quicker with words: the cathartic funny ones that humiliated and the mean ones that rectified and dispensed justice and righted their family. The price either way in those moments of revenge were disguised as justice but failed them further from the equanimity that they believed was their birthright.

“You should have said that,” Nat insisted after a shared laughing fit. “Remember that one. Okay, mom?”

And the next time, instead of steaming at the xenophobic sleights, her mother showed blank face to both Nat and her father as if it didn’t happen, an attempt to shield her daughter from another disappointment and her husband from another discouragement. But 8-year old Nat would not be done with it and summoned up all the muscles of her mighty wee finger, aimed it squarely at that lady, scrunched her face up tight and dispensed due justice:

“You ugly white mold,” she hissed, and thinking of all her mother’s insults to come later over bitter herb tea fixed with a lump of sugar, laughed in that lady’s face.

And then she looked to her mother, showing her, That’s how it’s done.

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