Four Blondes

Revised Chapter 2 

Jocey Leary 

Posthumous. Published by Paul England, 1985

We pull up slowly to a quiet house surrounded by very tall pines. Pebbles crunch and turn painfully underneath the car wheels. Four sombre blonde sisters meet us on the porch. Arms open. Darkened eyes that frighten me. Dark eyes I am afraid of.

They’re my second cousins from Virginia. Daddy always said there ain’t nothin’ good that ever came from an angelic expression that stares you down.  When we were younger mama always told me not to compare myself to blonde girls.

The oldest one reminds me of a Pre Raphaelite painting. Long and graceful and half-erased off the earth. When she walks in the forest she disappears within the foliage, and birdsong replaces her line of questioning.

Later, while getting ready for dinner, she would dig her nails into my forearm until four small red crescents bloom with red rushes of pain under my very anxious gaze. I’d take this pain at the dinner table with me. Turn it inward. 

“Jocey, why are your eyes glazed over with shine girl? Misty shine I say”

The living room sits with muted mustard undertones and dark green accents. It must be the most horrific pleasant afternoon in American history. My aunt is a dull penny with good intentions.

Later, when I would meet Paul in New York City, I’d remember these muted mustard yellows and oranges and bits of green. I stood there, quiet, in a black dress and waited for him to walk over and pluck me out of the nightmarish fantasy that had no beginning no end no resolve no trauma.
I met Paul in the middle of a subtle headache. He was not Paul. He was the intersection of desires unspoken. There was music flowing from a terrace and I don’t remember if I saw music in his face or in his hands first. But I heard music and I saw music and all along Paul just saw me. He stood by me and shaded my eyes from the sun. 

I imagine him making up a game with the blondes. Some kind of forest tag. Something to tame and nurture their violent energy. Harvest it. Look at the girls as if they were deer. Complex forest deer with wild, dark imaginations. And he’d calm me – the other human – into childhood huts of memory laughter suppressed, pupils dilated and melodies trilled and refashioned to fit our voices that were leathery soft gloves that turned into strong clothed hands that held me still still still still. 

A stillness came over me. 

A stillness that was the opposite of the frozen stillness at the table in Virginia that afternoon so long ago.

Orpheus Orpheus. What is this light? What is this love? 

My aunt dispenses cheap versions of biblical wisdom after every swallow. I imagine her on her knees in a faded motel room.

 The youngest blonde is fixated on the tiny red moons her sister inflicted on me. She turns the heavy fork around and makes crescent patterns in the potatoes. Patterened potatoes. Silky green beans blowing around the plate, each strand destined with a specific kind of fork-heaped dumping into the trash can.

Silence settles over our words. Each phenome coated in a gloomy muteness that presides majestically over the spoken content.

Paul chuckled and took my arm. One red wine stain on his crisp blue shirt. So endearing. Softness in his shoulders. An ache. A small ache staying, releasing small rushes of warmth in my collarbone, in my hipbone, in my wrists. 

Our move to New England is not exciting to these folk. These folk who rise with the Sun mechanically and pursue the trajectory of their lives with humility. Unquestioning. These are the faces that eradicated Madalena and her kind. These are the pseudo European pseudo Puritan pseudo feeble human lives that clawed their way through the mud, the cold, the bear carcass and the pine to mould wretched homes in the name of the King. Some king, which king? What’s a king?

I am beginning to tremble with sadness and with the realization that my New Mexico sun has stopped following our trail a long while out of Mississippi.

It’s given up, gathered its rays and looked to the Pacific for answers. 

The Ocean, in great tidal waves of symphonic strength, has still to respond.