1.
A man walked into the therapist's waiting room each Tuesday morning and shared it with Maggie who was there waiting for her son to be fixed. Should I tell him that it's not me that is seeing someone? she wondered. The man was slight, lithe. He sat lightly in the incongruous chair across from her. She sat on the faux brocade divan. Baroque music played discreetly. It might have been Vienna. In the third or fourth week, he moved from the chair to the divan and sat beside her. It was then that it started, a hand on her thigh, their heads tilted, perfectly perfectly quiet.
2.
Questions and answers. That time we lived in the old evangelical church with the full-immersion baptismal font right in the middle of the living room. Was there a painting on it, some fake tile or the rivers of Babylon? The altar was a kitchen, but we rarely cooked, and the only thing I remember is a microwave dinging when your spinach from the can warmed through, a pale slice of cheese melted on top. I think there was an old television, but we didn't have cable, and besides for Jeopardy and Star Trek, it was never turned on. The front doors -- it was a church -- opened to a vestibule and off that was an office where your shuffle was silenced by fake fur on the floor and all four walls. Or was it brown shag carpeting? You took your spinach in there and wrote on some giant early computer. It's funny, but I don't remember the bathroom at all. I think it was off the closet which was big for closets. I lined up my business clothes along the back wall, my pumps below. The bedroom was right there, to the left, the bed a boat where we drifted in and out with the tides. The back door, too. I think it was off the bathroom that I can't remember, and just across the cement path, where those Laotians with the beautiful babies lived in a concrete outer house, the smells of something cooking that didn't seem right. Right?
3.
We shelter in ourselves an angel
whom we constantly shock.
Jean Cocteau
Those who restrain desire do so
because theirs is weak enough
to be restrained.
William Blake
At the doughnut shop, I waited in line to buy a sesame bagel, toasted, with cream cheese, bacon and tomato.
A woman in an arm brace, the kind used for carpal tunnel syndrome, sat at a small table with an autistic man. He ate a powdered donut with jelly oozing out, and she played with three figs on a napkin.
The young man in front of me had a tattoo on his arm that read I Do The Wrong Things For The Right Reasons.
4.
I can hear the rumble through glass, legs covered in black leather, seam-splitting sides. Even in traffic, idling, that time we almost got caught in the park, the thin skin of my inner thigh burning, your fault.
Each of these holds an entire world, each so beautifully provocatively rendered. I hope you keep pulling out the threads.
Tasty bits that are sweet and salty. They will linger on my tongue all day and in my mind as well. Just lovely, Elizabeth.