Elizabeth Powell
I SPY: Associated Writers' Conference, Chicago, IL
He had wanted everyone to love him, especially the tall skinny ones with
highlighted hair and razor sharp shoulder blades. The ones that had
spurned him at Saint Augustus High School. It made him dizzy as a
drunken bee to think that someone might not like him. It made him want
to call people names and roll on the floor laughing at them if they
could not see his genius. He had made a career out of getting people to
think he was aces. When his charm didn't work the whole world went white
with television fuzz. Yet, when he saw her at the conference carrying
Professor Bigshot's carry-on luggage he wasn't sure who he was more in
love with. He had read all of Professor Bigshot's poems. He loved the
controversial one about 9/11 the best. But he couldn't concentrate, her
aquiline nose turned up like the edge of Connecticut. Held in by
expensive French underwires, her breasts were as molded as summer aspic.
Through her diaphanous rose colored shirt he could see his own blushing.
In his newly acquired Brooks Brothers suit he thought he might be two
inches taller. How perfect the collision when she tripped over his well
placed loafer. How fortunate to extend a hand to her and her boss before
they made their way to his very own poetry reading where he extolled the
virtues of the downtrodden made good, where he dove stanza by stanza
into conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. From the podium he ruled
the world, a Napoleonic type desperate for any cheerleader that might
surrender to his forces, plow under him like an ancient Europe finally
conquered. A full and final power over this chick and all she might do
for him made him enunciate his words so Choate Rosemary clearly even he
surprised himself. Professor Bigshot applauded with certainty, shaking
his head in agreement, up, down, up, down. He imagined the three of them
in his revolving Marriott sky top room paid for by the National Arts
Foundation. There would be no democracy tonight.
I SPY: Healthy Foods Co-op, Madison, Wisconsin
She knew he was a famous cartoonist, well sort of.
Famous enough for The New Yorker, but not famous enough to turn down the
local rag. Standing in line at Healthy Foods Coop she saw him carrying a ten
pound bag of organic carrots. She didn't like his cartoons and had heard he
was stuck up. From his strip in the local paper she had deduced over her
morning coffees and buttered rolls that he was not happily married. The man
needed someone to cook him a steak and fuck him on featherbed; that was
evident from the way his face was squinching up as he passed the carrots
from arm to arm. She wanted to be repulsed by him, but couldn't stop
staring. His large red Puma sneaker sporting an untied shoelace, the
newspaper under his arm. What was all the fanfare about, she wondered,
gently unloading her cage free eggs from her shopping cart and onto the
sticky black conveyer belt? Perhaps she would find out. Something about him
made her want to speak French again, wear the kind of panties the teenagers
wore, the ones that go up the bum like decorative floss. Averting her eyes
she began to feel his eyes on her now. Oh, she didn't like the outline marks
he made around her with his cartoonist's eyes, how he traced her over and
over again until she could feel a sort of charcoal hum around her. Yet, that
was his appeal, that simplification. That cartoon world. In the paper next
Sunday she could she herself, her caricature, the young but school-marmish
type, her hair up in a bun, her long thin fingers tickling him with the
imported spring mesculun salad mix in her cart, her breasts sprouting out
her shirt like a Saint Pauli girl, a bubble darting from her mouth, trying
to say, something.
I SPY: Saint Christopher Episcopal by the Sea, Palm Beach, Florida
He was in Palm Beach on vacation and appeasing his
Edith Wharton grandmother who told false stories about famous people she had
met over the course of the twentieth century. Today, they had been late for
church, Grandmother having developed the habit of having to count of the
church steps upon ascension. Now, as he sat quietly next to her thumbing
through his Book of Common Prayer, he felt a Guerlain breeze move by him and
into the pew ahead. The young woman was a Rite One kind of Anglican and
kneeled before she got into the pew. How he studied each strand of her hair
ahead of him. As if it were a psalm to be meditated upon. The altar
hummed with a privileged devotion, filled with the feeling of white lights,
like those hanging from trees at the Tavern on the Green. Everything smelled
upper middle class, cedar on lavender, hot iron on cotton. Her shoes were
pink and strapped around the ankle. He stared at the back of the heel as if
he were ascertaining the distance one must swim when faraway from shore. The
backs of her calves were slightly freckled and made him think of eating
blueberry jam in Maine with a cousin he had once French-kissed.
I SPY: Fletcher Allen Hospital, Burlington, Vermont
She wrapped him in the shroud of the MRI machine,
pushed a button and slowly he entered the cavern like a large penis entering
a large vagina. Everything was white, the inside of the tunnel, the blankets
over him, the white lights. The loud magnets wrestled invisibility threw
him, clapping something that sounded like Donald-Donald-Donald, and then
alternately Cowboy-Cowboy-Cowboy. He could feel the resonating part of the
magnetic resonating imagery. He could feel it cut through his chakras like
waves, like transcendence. He wasn't claustrophobic, instead he imagined her
in the glass surrounded booth with all the knobs, the headphones she wore in
case she needed to hear him whisper help, or squeeze the panic button which
meant get me the hell out of here. He imagined he was part of a science
fiction story, that all the humming and tribal thumping was replacing his
soul, or his personality, and that it was she who turned the lever that
would switch him to what she wanted. All that and swallowed into this large
white womb, reminded him why he ached for the musky, macho orderly who
walked in on him putting on his Johnny, his Romanesque nose, his large hands
holding the extra ear plugs the technician had called for, the ear plugs
that tried to mute out the clanging of a General Electric kind of world he
wanted to leave behind.
I SPY: Appletree Point Community Picnic, Briarcliff Manor, New York
For months they sat in the back of the car chanting
please-mommy please-mommy please-mommy with an engine like intensity. The
other mothers in the neighborhood had done it last Thanksgiving, someone had
an in with the City of New York or Macy's, she couldn't remember which.
Later, at the Neighborhood Block Party she brought
bruschetta with roasted garlic and plum tomatoes and basil from her window
garden, and had put it all on a platter she bought last month from Martha
Stewart.com. The saran wrap pulled over it so tightly it felt like her face,
newly done for her 40th birthday.
As a child she hated the Macy's Thanksgiving Day
parade. Holding her grandfather's large hairy hand through the crowds, the
Woody the Woodpecker had scared her with his huge, Godlike beak. She would
play the good mother and ask the gossiping PTA mothers how one got to be a
balloon holder in the first place. Their French-pink manicures pointed
across the street to - him.
He was sitting on the hood of his old 1973 BMW 2002
eating a plate of ribs. So he was the balloon man, she thought. Somehow he
worked for the city, in what capacity she did not know.
Later, that Thanksgiving she stood next to him, holding
adjacent ropes of that Ledean woodpecker. He had gotten her a security
clearance to do this. She thought she might be lifted to the air in flight,
when instead to hold the balloon made her feel as if she was descending,
descending, all the way down into the bowels of history.