Letters I Will Never Send

By Penelope Kahler Swan

From the Author
Has someone ever told you a secret that won’t stop haunting you?
Once I knew a lovely, rich, well-educated white lady who lived in the fairy tale she was taught would make her happy. It did not. She spent her days feeling guilty about being miserable, and her nights, exhausted, without being able to sleep.
Until one day, while doing charity work, she met a poor, black, Muslim Imam from the ghetto.
Because of The Imam she began to study Islam, and to fall in love. She tread where privileged white woman only enter as prey - are viewed, not as honest and trusting helpers, but gullible and stupid pains-in-the-ass. An innocent fool, the lady tried to become things that were not possible. Book-smart but street-stupid, often in danger without even knowing it, the lady walked through a chilling world where brutal murder was a norm, daily confounded by gut-wrenching truths, her only protection her own naivety.
Because she never stopped trusting and searching for answers, one day, the lady got a glimpse of the truth about the path she was walking - and snarled.
The lady wrote letters about what happened to her to a friend I never met. Never knew. She never mailed them for reasons I’ll never know. After she was gone I found a blue satin box in a locked bureau drawer where, for years and years, she kept the letters, now impossible for me to mail, or forget.
What is this story about?
A heart-wrenching romance with the greatest of lovers...A woman confused by life who is willing to walk anywhere to find a better way of living...This is not a story for anyone offended by a woman who questions her own religious beliefs...This is a story that may make you uncomfortable, or make you think about some aspects of life in ways you wish you hadn’t learned about. Beware before buying.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988301924

Book preview

sunset.

MRS JW GOT-ROCKS CONTINUES HER QUEST FOR THE HIGH-FALOOTING

The river is freezing. She does not want to. She groans against the ice. I am out in the frozen yard, where I have run to hide my crying, when the sound of her pain begs me come down to her edge, to share our grief. Hers cannot compare to mine. Her burden will pass with spring.

If I step toward her, the grass crunches. I must stand still in the shadow of the moon so my husband does not hear, throw open a window, and call me in from the cold night.

The yard is frosted. My breath turns to ice but I am not cold -- wine, much wine, far too much wine, again -- but then -- the velvet of this dress is heavy. Running my fingertips along its softness I loose track which blue-black belongs to the night. I suffer two nights under the same moon, one gowned in velvet, one robed in silk, one in the yard, one in the house -- both -- run to escape my prison bed, the moon full in my eyes, my orange cat cradled in my arms.

The night robed in silk I woke surrounded with a presence. Wanting, needing, not understanding where I was I fled -- down halls, down stairs -- until stopped by a wall of window to stare at the moon rolling over the river, my orange cat crept into my arms.

This night, gowned in velvet, I flee at the thought of getting into it -- my prison bed. I stumble back outside to stare through a wall of frozen air at the moon rolling over the river, my orange cat crept into my arms.

The world, this flight, is frozen.

Reality is a symbol.

Ice-coated pine needles, slivers of the light of the moon, pop and sparkle, cut and stab, slide my imagination down their razor-sharp glitter to the once Indian-colored river crossing the color line. Going white. Like me. Once I was an Indian. That's why my mind can slide down the razor-sharp treetops without getting cut. I was once an Indian. Part Indian. My great-aunt said so. Other relatives said, no. My great-aunt said the others said no because she was the only one who would admit what I am. Am I? An Indian? I hope so.

Sometimes I know so. Like in Peru when I spoke and the natives laughed. The guide explained that they thought I was Inca. When I opened my mouth and out came small-town midwestern America they were so surprised, they laughed.

Peru...

I got my socks scared off at Machu Pichu. An Inca Priest who saw me strike off alone down the Inca Trail, heard me shrieking, and came to my rescue, explained what happened to me. The shrubbery that moved as somebody nobody could see scaled the cliff at my elbow, and the voice that whispered in my ear when no one was there, were the dandy handiwork of a small dark split-hoofed god who lives on a neighboring mountain peak. The Inca Priest pointed out the exact cloud-draped peak. He is a lustful god, the Priest expanded, who loves nothing more than terrorizing lovely unsuspecting maidens.

Mystical stuff like that is commonplace in Peru. So -- why not an invisible god leaping off his mountain to chase me? I could use the attention. I could use a little magic.

Me and my orange cat stand in the frozen grass and study the roll of the moon over the river, firm in the certainty of Indians who have far better things to do than drink too much wine in country clubs where the rich and powerful congregate. The sheen off the riverbank skis me from Peru to Aspen. I sense my feet shifting swiftly, adeptly, down the fall line. I'm so good at it, remembering it. I do not end the ride wrapped around a tree. I slip under the ice of the river to stare up into the next eon: a relic, frozen proof -- once there were Indians in America.

I whisper my deepest understanding into the ear of my orange cat. Do you know what it is like to have a man brace himself when you touch him? The cat goes berserk under the moon, licking my neck with his rasp tongue. The skin of my neck cannot handle his devotion. I put him down on the frozen basil. He insists on being reinstated in my arms at once. Refused, he glares, accusing up from the basil. Tail a-twitch he comes at me, wild green eye-slits daring me to deny him. Neck on fire, I do deny him. Wave him off with verbal chastisement. Furious, he turns tail. Slinks away over frozen nasturtiums. Sulks off across crackling bee balm. A hiss, he disappears beneath the ice-sealed stalks of Brussels sprouts and tomato plants.

I stare after my cat.

Some animal cries out in the wild across the river, breaking ten million years of baffled silence to accomplish a tone of complete melancholy. Perhaps she raises her head from the entrails of her latest kill, divining in the slimy guts the futility of her passionate struggle to survive: foreseeing in the still warm liver, extinction of ordinary murderesses and their ravenous offspring: determining in the still quivering spleen, failure for herself and all her kind. Mother Nature's maternal instincts are explicit. Ordinary offspring she disposes of, offering them up as dinner to whomever happens to be passing. Mother only nurtures the exceptional. Torture by futility for zillions of the ordinary is the price she must pay for the occasional exceptional offspring... Perhaps it is I, crying out across the river. I hear myself, futile, squandered, doomed among the hopeless ordinary, filling the frozen wild with perfect melancholy. Uncertain that I have not actually cried out, I swing to look. Did he hear? Need I hide? To avoid going in to be alone with a well-known stranger? The moon fills the dark glass of the first floor of the river house with naked oaks. Artifice lights the windows of his second-floor office. His shadow glides about in the unnatural light, going back and forth to his bathroom, his closet, his dog. He's going to drag the house for me soon, when it's time for me to die in prison. I can't stand to go in to that bed this night. Sleep is a thing to share. I sleep alone. He is in the bed but we don't share it. We don't touch at the anywhere. I rip a frozen rose off a bush to address it. What kind of man binds a woman to him for her needs and then does not fulfill them? The body demands, the heart demands, the spirit demands—he plays golf---exchanges loving drools with his dog. The tears start, quiet, but so hot they have to run off my face to freeze. A light flicks on in the downstairs of the house and I hear him call.

Precious?

Everybody, he calls Precious, me, his daughters, his dog. I hate him a great deal. More all the time. He's always gone. Even when he's here. Bound to him I am trapped in loneliness. Under the terms of my contract, what I, his favorite possession am allowed, relationship-wise, is to sit in adoration while he is admired by successful associates who are admired by other successful associates. This to him is a relationship... What is a relationship to me?

Precious?

I panic onto the cement walk circling the house at the foundation. Escaping along shadows I encounter myself in the garden I created the summer I spent practicing being happy, snipping off defunct marigold heads, snapping pungent necks, sniffing my fingers after each snap.

Or was it mums?

Let me ask you something. When your body gets moved---is dragged---tricked into moving back to a town where it absolutely does not want to be by a man who professes to love you profoundly---how long does it take for the mind to follow?

Sniff.

It is mums--frozen.

The cat attacks out of them, mad with senility or--finally, in senility, onto the truth. He leaps from hiding among the frozen dead to capture my silk stockings, cruel claws unsheathed from the orange velvet. I address him kindly. He looks up over fangs threatening to pierce beyond the silk should I insult him with further camaraderie.

People are not as funny as cats. Cats are funnier because they can't do as much damage. An orange velvet cat can in no way compare to a blue velvet puss when it comes to sudden violence.

Lithe sharp-fanged beasties, is it?

I grab the orange cat by two sets of velvet legs and hurl him across the yard into the frozen peonies.

I will give this to my husband: I respect his ability to remain gentle in the face of the cat's present personality. Regularly, the cat, once a loving companion, charges across the yard, leaps, lands on my husband's head and hangs there by his claws. My husband, steadfast and true in spite of this aberration, disengages the cat from his head and places it beside him on the step or wherever he happens to be sitting. Then, as in a more controlled past, when the cat made a purring entrance, he extols the cat's friendship. Never once has he thrown him into the peonies. I search my soul, looking for shame due to hurling the cat. I don't find any. The cat has taken to acting nuts and I feel justified in kicking his ass.

The cat returns to court my favor, rubbing, purring, and causes me to recall a favorite object lesson of our last marriage counselor, which was based upon the fairy tale of the princess and the frog. When did the frog become a prince? When the princess kissed him, you say? No no. My husband terminated the frog counselor because he talked too much about sex. That frog guy, my husband suspected, had some pretty kinky sexual problems of his own. The frog became a prince when she threw him against a wall.

A sound on the street turns me toward a bum shuffling his feet along, everything his in this world turtled on his back. He is passing late in the year. When the seasons change is when bums go by, going toward, or away from, the Interstate. Bums, like birds, butterflies, elephants and convertibles, migrate. This bum is black. A black man and a white woman cannot share the same bed bug. Cimex rotundatus is the black man's bed bug. Cimex lectularuis is the white woman's. If a louse decides to change hosts it will be dead before a week is out, so a black man need never fear lying down next to a white woman and getting up like a dog. I gained this piece of information studying in preparation for traveling to Africa.

The first African man with whom I was intimate leaned across me on an airplane to say something sharp to the passenger seated next to me. He angled suddenly from the aisle and spoke across me. Things unknown came out of him, sounds and a fragrance, not cinnamon, some human spice that had to do with being part of Africa. He blew the scent across me, bathed me with hints of the things a black African male keeps hidden from a white American female. He withdrew the error instantly, swiftly moving on down the aisle, but it was too late. I was hot on the scent of something that a moment before I had not known existed.

The second African man with whom I was intimate, I never saw at all. He awakened me from a deep sleep between dirty sheets to hear him sing in the dark. He was amplified, enormous with meaning--he filled the night outside our flea-trap hotel completely. There was only him and whatever it was in the night that wanted him to sing out his heart's longing. I was not there, nor was the disgusting room we got stuck in our first night in Africa when visiting dignitaries bumped all tourists from the only decent hotel, nor was the shirt-tail town where the man lived in such yearning, nor the country, the continent, nor the centuries. While the voice sang out against the coming of dawn, magnified by some ancient kind of amplification, an elephant loomed by the open window, over-powering the smell of the sheets--a disciple responding to the call of his Tarzan. In the morning the guide dispelled my rapture. The voice come before dawn to engulf me and the elephant was standard pre-dawn Muslim hype and finger-popping--the endless Muslim insistence that chats with god must be organized, regulated, supervised. My heart had given the lament so much more room than that, the short while I owned it. When Reality took back the lament, he shrunk it.

All I a saw in Africa lives in the genes of the black bum who treads the night outside our expensive curlicue wrought-iron fence. Where could he be going? The boat marina? The wood? The reservoir? I should invite him in for a drink. We could talk about Lucy, four million years of memory found sleeping in a valley of his homeland. Somewhere in me is four million years of some Lucy's memory. Where am I going?

Directly overhead, a window throws open and my husband, placing his head on the sill as if upon a tray, presents his sullen face to the moon.

Precious?

He looks straight up into the moon for me. He thinks I have learned to fly? What does he want? To torture me, blow by blow, with one more golf game? I birdie seven. On eight—------ I stop breathing so not to be detected by the desires of the severed head. Once I was bonkers about that head. If only he would use it to kiss me instead of the dog. I stand absolutely still under the head poked out the window like a gargoyle, like a portent...

Like my husband’s Dear Aunt Maybelle.

Dear Aunt Maybelle, gooseberry eyes too big behind thick glasses, adored scandalous gossip. When there was scandalous gossip, Dear Aunt Maybelle was dead center exhibiting vinegar disapproval as proof that she and her brood were socially and morally far above the scandalous behavior she was presently hearing. Dear Aunt Maybelle saw with a family eye. Anyone not related by blood was of no value whatsoever other than as audience while she extolled the superiority of her family's experience, attitude, and position, over everyone else's-- (most certainly me and mine). The women in my family have no scent to their bodies. Not even the underpants.

Dear Aunt Maybelle reported this fact to me on the river deck while I was being allowed to comb her hair. Instantly I recalled the powerful odor of my daddy's hard working body, which I had found pleasurable up to that moment of cognizance when Maybelle pointed out the connection between me and mine and the lower life forms. I thanked Providence we were outside where the fumes of my lower-type body were less likely to wander off and intrude upon the sensibilities of finer folk whose higher body forms hadn't any.

Scent.

I began that day to change my underpants, a lot, and keep my nose aimed at my armpit. Summers and times of crises I go through a wardrobe of drawers while the normal world displays nary a worry about the single pair they stand about smelling in. But I know. Aunt Maybelle set me straight. Maybelle set everybody straight. Except Uncle Billyboy. Dear Aunt Maybelle’s husband. Him, she couldn’t.

Uncle Billyboy got blown up on the farm, way back when. Thinking he'd not live anyhow they sewed him up on the kitchen table. Everything was put back pretty close to where it belonged but he was ever after beyond straightening. (Even before the accident Maybelle knew Uncle Billyboy was less than she deserved but it was all right, he wasn't related to her by blood.) In Maybelle’s presence Uncle Billyboy stood unobtrusive as he could, making himself part of the closest wall, colorless eyes fixed on something far away inside of himself, politely folded hands protecting his penis, the only sign of response to Maybelle’s world in one broken cheek, which would get, in evidence of corked rebuttal, to twitching.

Precious?

My husband pulls in his head and slams shut the window, leaving me staring at the Victorian mini-mansion I have restored beyond its original grandeur to a swell place for a party or a magazine shot of turn-of-the-century inns where people visit but never live. I hear him up there, banging doors, checking to see if I've escaped into a closet again. He's really going to be pissed when he catches me, punish me with silence, studied martyrdom before his friends, slipped allusions to his burden, near to tears breakdowns before the children, perfectly timed irritation of me to a shrieking rage exactly when someone else has an appointment to join us. I think I'll spend this month in my bathroom.

Stop wanting, you say, Bear. That's the trick to it, to life, just stop wanting.

The ice on the river, groans.

My husband re-opens the window to grill the moon about the content of the closets, changes his mind, and slams the window shut again. How about if I stop him from going? What if I holler up: Darling, I’ve invited the bum in for a chat. Be great times, you talking up your latest game, the bum and me keeping our legs crossed so as not to offend your high-body-type. You'd have so much in common, you two, both being custodians. Him, of whatever he can get his hands on. You, of that special body of knowledge, How To Control Everybody and Own Everything. Or what if I holler up: Dear? Have you noticed the mess the world is in? What if you gave up one game a week, spent one day a week trying to do something about it? It looks from down here as if you have the time, brain, know-how, connections, funding, and responsibility to do that. Dear, what I'm trying to holler up at you is, bums are needing, I am needing--you spend your life hitting balls with sticks. Darling? (I'm still hollering up in my mind.) The sexiest thing about a man is his attitude toward life. If you would do that, try to clean up the mess in the world, everyone would want to fuck your eyes out.

Maybe that's why he doesn't.

Judging by his interest in me.

Maybe I shouldn't.

Judge by his interest in me.

My finger ends sense along the rope of pearls about my neck. The moon reflects their journey in a bay of basement windows as tall as I am. I can see through all of me into the basement that smells of mice. My husband didn’t put a lid on his dog chow. As nice as the mice found the unguarded chow, they didn't stay underground. While my husband was at his desk muttering at crosswords the mice kept skittering into his bathroom for a nice drink out of his toilet so he had to start killing them. He encouraged the cat to do it, took the cat down the elevator into the basement and left him all day to do murder but, come evening, when the cat had to come back up the elevator, the cat went straight to the licking of my husband’s neck, so my husband switched to traps, snap--snap--house full of bodies--no thought of a funeral.

Dear Aunt Maybelle had a series of funerals for Uncle Billyboy when he escaped her. Everything was multiple, towns, funeral homes, priests, rosaries, red-Jell-O dinners served by the Good Ladies Of The Church. My husband went with two wives. The first time the call came for a Mrs. to be introduced I tried for it but she won. My never having been introduced, I saw consternation on the faces of the righteous Good Ladies when I joined the red Jell-O line. I left the line, went back to the motel, and changed my underpants. Maybelle considered the affair a success. She intended to extend the series but Uncle Billyboy, unworthy to the end, began to melt, which was all right, he was not related by blood.

Marriage is the death of love. Bear, whatever happens to me, you quote Shakespeare. You say what you think and then back yourself up with Shakespeare. But Bear--(I call you Bear because your letters growl)(I’m having this conversation with you while staring at myself in the dark basement windows, tall as a short man)--what is death? The boundary between two concepts? One thing changing into another? Is that what's happening here? The rose of my love, dropped to die, becomes earth, comes forth transformed--I will now know love as a turnip? I don't feel like a turnip. Do I look like a turnip? Bear, I'll have everything lifted. I swear I am still a rose fit for that male-female thing. Has my license expired? Do I no longer meet the requirements