HORSENECK: The Meaning of Ordeal

By B. K. Smith

"I finally detached with the understanding that people cannot give to you what they don't have. I am not feeling the love because... And because of what was probably this unsatisfied need for affection, I have a history of trusting complete strangers, some of whom have, to their credit, risen to the occasion by displaying the kindness thus expected of others at the eleventh hour. I made friends easily. One day, impelled by mutual attraction, or curiosity, you strike up a conversation and discover shared interests and a new friendship is born. You try to live the same hopes and dreams, feeling at ease, even happy, and this friendship becomes part of your life, a little bit like family. Then treachery strikes and a great desolate wind sweeps away those dreams. Wounded and angry, you wish you were dead for ever thinking or believing and falling for it again.

Then other similar mirages appear on the horizon, as you walk in your own landscape, and you rise to the occasion once again, and you are disappointed once again, and one fine day all that is left of your spirit is a tiny scar on your heart no bigger than a fingernail scratch. You no longer feel anything either. You no longer care.

Only many years later, only when I had given myself passively to this lovelessness in the conviction that I had metamorphosed from a loveless childhood to the adulthood of more of the same, disappointment, betrayal and loss. Only with this wisdom had I come to believe in nothing, and only then was I surprised by love.

What is the meaning of ordeal? You'll know it when you know it.

This book contains "Papier Mache Bowls - Vessels of Grieving."
42 full-color photographs,"The creative meaning of ordeal."

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Nov 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780990930501

Book preview

Author

This book contains Papier Mache Bowls—Vessels of Grieving

42 full-color photographs, the creative meaning of order.

Lipstick Mountains Memoirs #4

B. K. Smith

This book contains Papier Mache Bowls –Vessels of Grieving

42 full-color photographs, the creative meaning of ordeal.

Lipstick Mountains Press

Madison Avenue Publishers LLC

2016

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, including electronic information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publishers except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

HORSENECK

The Meaning of Ordeal

B.K. Smith

Copyright © 2016 B. K. Smith

ISBN 978-0-9909305-0-1

The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs Series

#1 CHELSEA MATINEE –

Memoirs of an Easy Woman

#2 SANDS POINT –

Memoirs of a Money Trader

#3 RATTLE SNAKE LODGE –

Memoirs of a Seeing Woman

#5 MANIFEST DESTINY –

Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

Also:

The Stiletto Stories

Books & Big Kitchens Series

Lipstick Mountains Press

Madison Avenue Publishers LLC

Scottsdale, Arizona

602 622 1078

[e-mail]

Hiraeth

A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was;

the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

Everything I know I learned from someone.

I have been graciously mentored by Lillian Smith,

Milan Kundera (excerpt from The Unbearable Lightness

of Being), Eugene O’Neill, Annie Dillard and

Ayn Rand (excerpt from The Fountainhead).

For Paul and Nasdaq

I miss both of you every day. Meow.

I went on this journey to find an image of the human being I could be proud of. I had to find what resonates for me, what I believe is meaningful, and to know the creative meaning of ordeal.

-- Lillian Smith

ONE

When I was very young, I watched over my mother. At four or five, I already knew the basics of taking care of, rather than being cared for. I brought her saltine crackers for her morning sickness and she packed nothing for my morning snack. It was perfect.

It was at that tender age that I began locking myself in the bathroom to play. I always played there then. I practiced speaking as I spoke to myself in the mirror. I sang in quiet echoes so I couldn’t hear anything. Moreover, they couldn’t hear me. Come find me. Hurt me. I lay down in the empty bathtub with all of my toys and I sang to my dolls. I reflected in the mirror. Someday I will be old enough to leave. No one will even notice or care.

I recall my ‘fifties’ mother in her late twenties and early thirties through the telescoped eye of a child, which naturally distorts the intentions of parents and enlarges them to giants. She was larger than life, my mother. Strikingly stylish and clever. Clear-skinned, she had large dark eyes and penciled-in black eyebrows, but that was only when she was going on a date with the man I always thought of as my father, even though I sometimes had doubt. She dressed up and she did the whole thing as a Broadway production with bubbles, perfumed dusting powder, sheer black nylons folded into noisy tissue paper and boxed. Exquisite. She wore Chanel No. 5 and something else — Blue Midnight?

Otherwise, on an ordinary day, a day filled with bologna sandwiches, the ice cream truck chimes, and diaper bins, even I knew at that tender age that there was something missing. Something was off. Her eyes fixed on some point far beyond the kitchen sink and our small cyclone fenced-in yard, mostly crab grass, in need of mowing what little survived the swing set. Even allowing for the child’s telescoped eye, my mother was a tall woman who thought of herself as oversized, and for some reason she never quite fit in. She had few friends, girlfriends who stopped by for coffee or happened to be in the neighborhood with a cake. She was bigger than her husband, especially in her high heels. Or maybe my parents were the same height when they danced, but she was clearly wider from behind.

Our beautiful mother, she was the mysterious kernel, the contagion seed in our family’s doomed whole. Even then, I knew that she was not doing it entirely out of choice. Her monster helped her. Empowered was she by deep irrational fears and a dark yearning to hurt something badly — as she had been hurt? — if only to let off some steam. To feel better about herself. This thing with raven hair had scooped us up in its great shovel and given us to her like malleable playthings, toys to be turned over, pushed, prodded, poked and tossed. Each spent, over-used, no longer providing amusement, as it were, or free domestic labor in exchange for idle promises, adoration that was as much rehearsed and earmarked, as it was a double-edged sword. It extended to each of us like IVs; she fed us and selectively nourished some who then regurgitated and invigorated its acidic-addicted taproot. Others provided entertainment, and continue to do so, as history will, we are reminded over and over again, repeat. The flying monkeys. Others yet will record — to the best of their recollection, and more so, to the best of their ability — their own renditions, and their own litany of complaints and excuses. There were so many of us, we were clearly disposable. So best to be quiet. Fit in. Trust no one.

There is none as fair, Mother dear. There is none as fair.

Soon it will time for your enema.

These were the things I knew without knowing why, things I learned as a child listening with half an ear to all that was said, and most intently to all that was not said. I remember the silent semaphores most of all. A sensitive child will pick up existential threats in utero. My name spoken in another room with an angry voice sets my jaw a-clench. I lay down in the bathtub. I covered my ears. What was she saying? I did what? To whom? But I wasn’t even home from school yet. My father threatening the strap. My mother agreeing it’s the only thing.

I had designed a whole world when I was a child. In silence, I made a book of drawings, pages and pages. It told the story of my life, a beautiful picture of what I had not yet lived. My book was where I went to be free, to draw music and to write poetry. I called the book Fantasia after one of those experiences that collides with you like a drunken driver on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the matinee, and it changes your life in a very profound way. Hippos in pink tulle and mouse ears in black silhouette, classical music and sorcery, and everything dancing.

Only now do I understand that we continue along like gentle tepid water flowing down a hill, moving more or less in one direction until something or someone causes us to crash, and quite unaware, after a spurt or splat, some kind force enters us and we find a new course. Sometimes the path of least resistance, sometimes just another obstacle to surmount. I blocked shapes on white construction paper, mostly drawing with No. 2 pencils and sixty-four Crayola crayons. I was much happier during that period of my life, when I began to touch those waxy tubes of rich color. What could be more stimulating than color and texture and coloring outside the lines? Like Chagall. Like Picasso. Given over to color, we are back in a time before we had words. Pictures are the stories of our lives long before we acquired the arsenal of words and compound sentences. Pictures do not need interpretation or clarification, justification or retraction. No returns. No repeats. No regrets.

That was a magical time. I had clear eyes and I had happy feet, red shoes with taps. And I marveled at the lights, the fireworks sparkling out on Flushing Bay, from a second story kitchen window. Bright exploding glitter dripped down the dark sky canvas.

I marveled at how one can mix two primary colors and get a third, and you can add texture, visual and tactile, and then, adding music, my book turned into a fantastic world, and one more thing, lest we forget, was the minx. No, not a mouse, or even a muse, it was possibility of course. It was wonder.

Soon it will be time to take out your tonsils.

Alone and innocent, the myriad of colors embraced, enfolded and suggested just about anything I could imagine. You take it in, the color and the light. You take it in and it changes you forever. It changes you forever. Forever. Forever. Do you understand forever? Forever is all-pervasive and ever-present. Forever is organic. Forever is a long time. Forever changes everything.

Like the color blue, the soul that is blueness: A blueness that is influenced by sunlight passing through it; or the blues of the desert sky in the last moments of sunset, when night is just falling. Iris is blue. A light, celestial blue, the same as the Virgin Mary’s blue cloak. The blue of the Caribbean is different — aquamarine blue, a glittering blue. Then marine, that filmy blue that gets darker, for a flash shows purple, in layers or in patches and in smudges or clots. Or blobs — amorphous blobs of oozing rich and delicious color.

Think of this. Think of licking warm almond paste off your fingers in Grandma’s kitchen. The color I once searched for is not beige, or taupe, or even ecru, the word I am searching for is al-mond, that sighing sound, that feeling of pure serenity that is a moment of sweetness, of bliss, a flash, so easy to miss. It disintegrates in the darkness, on your tongue, and it fizzles off into that inky emptiness of evening space as it is without light.

My memories of later years, school years, were fairly routine. I was a class leader, an imaginative general, not quite the director and not quite the producer, when it came to any kind of performance, especially where applause was expected. My father told me I was lazy and that would be partly true. The truth is I was bored, unhappy and afraid. Always the understudy, never the lead. This fate did not exactly inspire me. Nor did wonder bread and margarine. Fried bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise. I would have to say that it happened right here, in my adolescence that I stopped eating. Failure to thrive. I began to starve myself, and began slipping silently through the cracks. Noise bothered me, so a combination of restlessness and imagination led me to the quiet library, the quiet swirling sea of written words and continents of parchment, inks and fonts.

Today I might be diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder — a low tolerance. For what? Everything. Noise, confusion and injustice. Yes, especially for that, injustice. And stupidity. I was, as they say barely above a whisper, an unusual child. They made it sound bad. I was sensitive. I dreamed this. I heard that.

Soon it will be time for you to menstruate.

To what?

Late at night when the house was finally still, when I got some quiet time, I went upstairs to a room I shared with my two young sisters. I attempted to contain all of my feelings of loss and fear, especially my fear of loss, inside the clean white borders of the clean white pages. The gold and green and the ruby-red swirls undulated across the pages and sometimes onto my pillowcase. The skies were brilliant and blue and sometimes purple, with black and mauve mountains, and arbor reaching overhead in an attempt perhaps to touch the hot sun — rays shooting straight out from its center, into a mysterious distance, out there for as far as the eye could see, yellow grass, pungent after a long rain, and split rail fencing disappeared into the imaginary horizon line. A ranch colored outside the lines and borders of this small room in all sixty-four shades of rich, waxy color. I must have seen this in a book somewhere. I don’t remember where.

Although there were hundreds of things and legions of people in my picture world, when I imagined myself there, I was singular and I was silent. Waiting. Composed and serene in the midst of swirling chaos, wearing short white gloves, a pastel pill box, like Jackie Kennedy’s, my ankles crossed.

My family’s house and the internal dynamics were such that my jeweled slippers might have slipped and got caught up in a giant wind storm, a psychic tornado too large and too wild for me to wrap my psychic wings around — and I’m afraid I may have lost my balance, or my nerve, and I believe I may have fallen down the stairs — or been pushed.

Don’t ask me what happened. I know you want to. What was the defining moment? you might ask.

Say, instead, there are simply moments in your life when you know that the next sentence on the page will change your life, even though as you are anticipating the very sentence your life is already changed by the thought. Changed some time ago really, when you first noticed