Saturday Musings, 27 February 2010

Good morning,

I walked over a muddy patch of yard yesterday, sinking in my soft leather boots to a half-inch below sidewalk level. As I shifted the load of my briefcase to my left hand to flash the key fob in the direction of my dingy Saturn, I drew in a long breath of the morning's coolness. Surely I felt an undernote of spring?

A client sat in front of my desk, two hours later, earnestly clutching a plastic bag in which she had carefully placed a velvet embroidered blanket. This is from home, she told me. I brought it for you, because I was so hard on you. I stared, unthinking, at her pale smooth face and the high arch of her delicate brows. I said I hated you, she gushed. I shouldn't have told the judge that. I sighed.

She had made her sister bring a bundle of things from storage, including the mauve expanse of bead-fringed tapestry that she now held out to me, the only peace offering she could afford. I thought about her home, about an under-nourished eleven-year-old foster girl walking in the streets of a Kansas town, meeting her first Mexican immigrant. He needed something, she recalled. The others were afraid of him, but I wanted to know what he was saying. I begged him to teach me and I just learned, and I stole food from my aunt's kitchen for him, and then others came.

She walked along a train track with her new friends. They chattered in Spanish, gesturing to the strange, foreboding world around them. She gazed at what they saw, the familiar, drab Midwestern contours. They met in winter, and walked along the train trestle high over the old streets of the dingy town, along the concrete overpasses. They scrambled down the sides of culverts, the young girl speaking English, pointing, gesturing, a cluster of children behind, the tall young man beside her. Above them, birds soared with timeless ease, and she said, Hawk, and he said, Halcon. As they raised their faces -- his a dusky gold, hers ivory -- a winter wind kissed their cheeks, and he said, viento, and she laughed, a long, high trill. He stopped; she stopped; and the gaggle of chattering little ones behind them stopped. He lifted one hand, slowly, and touched her mouth, and said Que bella.

She had her first child three years later, fourteen, thin, living in her sister's small frame house. He had left while she still carried the baby, moving west to a bigger city, looking for work. Before getting into his old Toyota, he had placed his hand on her belly, and said, bambino, and she had put her own frail hand over his and said, baby. He smiled at her then, and told her, in his smooth, practiced American, I will send for you. And she believed.

He did not return until the child was walking, and his stories of struggling to earn money appeased her. She sat at his feet, in her sister's living room, while he raised a can to his mouth and took a long pull of cheap beer. It stinks, bella, he muttered. Nobody hires Mexicans. From another part of the house came the sound of laughter, as her sister bathed the boy and sang to him. She closed her eyes, and from far away she swore she could hear her mother's voice, singing the same words, carrying the same gentle melody, Little boy kneels at the foot of his bed, droops on little hands, little gold head. Hush, hush, whisper who dares. Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

The man did not stay. Another day, another walk, another tall, brown boy speaking in rapid Spanish. Her child had the same smooth dark hair, the same golden complexion. She talked to the child as she talked to all the children, in rapid Spanish with the dialect of his father's Torreon. And the child grew, and the new baby inside of her grew, and the English of the new lover grew, and this time, he held her as they lay on the twin bed at the back of hersister's house, the boy in his trundle, her silent disapproving sister in the one bedroom next to them. And he said, Que bella, and this time, he walked one day to the pawn shop on the main street and bought a thin gold band for her finger.

And then they went to the city, because he could not get work, and she was twenty-one with two children and had nearly forgotten how to speak English. Standing at the counter in the local state office, begging for WIC and food stamps, she peppered her speech with rapid Mexican. Her children went to a free program for the children of immigrants, and they lived in one room with a hot plate, a cracked sink, and a small grimy toilet in a cupboard that the landlord had called a washroom.

The darkness first descended upon her when the little one was six months old. Her husband had vanished by then, leaving one day with a promise to return while the infant still nursed at her breast and the older boy stood beside her chair, seven years old and uncertain to whom he belonged. She smiled with the painful pretense that all women have worn as their men departed, for all time, in all countries, in all ages. When the black moods overtook her, they all huddled under the bed, or in the closet of the room to which she moved when she could no longer stand their old landlord's hungry stares. The baby cried, the boy pleaded, and still she drew them close to her, with their filthy clothes and empty bellies. And when the fury passed, she felt weightless. She scurried around the room, bagged their trash to throw onto the back stoop, and scrambled eggs in a battered pan on the grubby, two-burner stove.

She never knew who called the state. Leaning forward, towards me in my office, months later, she speculated. I wouldn't let the landlord touch me. He might have called. Her eyes darted around the room, searching for a secret listener. My baby's father wouldn't call, but the older boy's father might. He never trusted me. I ran my finger across the pictures of the room as the police had found it, on the dank December day when the arrested her for child neglect. The older boy had come to the door of their apartment holding a bowl of Ramen noodles. He had told them, in his peculiar mix of Spanish and English, that he was making spaghetti for the baby. Where is your mother, they asked. He went away and returned with a note in her delicate, spidery hand. Call my cell phone, it asked, and gave a number. Open the door, they told the child, and he did.

She had been piling trash on the back stoop for a month. I had a toothache, she explained. I shook my head. We didn't live there, she told me, and I asked if anyone could corroborate her story. I was moving out. We were just there to pack. I spread the pictures out in front of her. Nearly empty rooms, a cradle in one corner, mouse droppings on a thin, soiled mattress. Stacks of empty cans. Strips of cloth hanging from the windows, duct-taped to the wall. See? she begged. I love my children, we would not live like this. I was just there to pack. I am not a bad mother.

Her rapid speech. The fragments of Spanish. The frenzy in her eyes. The soft, urgent whisper. Por favor, guardar mis bebés. I did not need a translator. I knew what she meant.

Sitting now, at my computer, in my warm home, with the dog lying at my feet glancing at me occasionally to make sure that I am not displeased with her, I hear my client's voice, echoing in my mind forever. In the background, just behind her lilting, urgent queries, I hear other sounds -- a crying child, an angry man. The eager cries of a beautiful, tall boy, calling to his lover. The noises of a city street, far below the iron rail on which a young girl walks, free, unprotected, unafraid. The lyrical voice of a tired young woman, soothing her child, telling him that everything will be all right when Papa comes home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 20 February 2010

Good morning,

If the sky allowed, I could see the weak winter sun higher than usual as I sit to write. I have allowed myself a solid eleven hours of sleep after one of the most arduous weeks of recent years. As I made my weary way home from court yesterday, I could feel the weight of work settling with intent on my spindly shoulders, across my fragile back. I had had enough. I was going home.

On the narrow city street, heavy trucks wind their path through my neighborhood, their occupants hopping down from the pondering beast to snatch the trash or the recycling. The noise of their grinding gears perforates the steady whooshing of my furnace and the ticking of the keys beneath my fingers. Around me, the floors have a gathering grime from lack of attention, and a fine layer of dust and dander sits on shelves, tables and the smooth backs of my oak chairs.

I have had crowing victories and orchestrated acceptable but bittersweet compromises this week, and the stench of near-defeat combines on my tired frame along with the intoxicating aroma of success. I have suffered no failure other than the unavoidable battering that any family law litigant must suffer to some degree, though even that inevitable collateral damage seems to me to be too high a cost to pay for untangling oneself from a bond meant to be eternal. While I would not trade my practice in Love's aftermath for a less emotional area of law, at times I wish that I could leave my clients' stress on the entryway to my office suite, and abandon their problems after five, as I might a discarded draft contract left waiting to be examined after nine a.m. on the next working day.

The city workers have completed their round on my street, and quiet descends onto my home. I hear the steady hum of the computer's fan, and an occasional sigh from the hound in her bed. The black cat, with one bad leg served by three strong ones, has mewled until the front door swung open to let him back into the fresh air, and I can only hope, for the sake of his human servants, that this is not the adventure that is his undoing. I cannot cage him, just as I cringe at seeing a wild bird caught and foisted into a cage. I cannot curtail his freedom, and so, knowing each foray might be his last, I allow him to choose.

My sister called last evening and mentioned that her blood pressure had sky-rocketed. I cannot even fathom what that might mean, since my own normal blood pressure is a dizzying 90/60. Hovering at 170/123, she murmurs, and I feel my own heart race. But I am a Corley, and so, as Corleys must, I disdain to speak of fears. Well, if you die tonight, can I have the quilt that Mom gave you, I ask. She giggles. You're terrible! she protests. If I die tonight, do you want me to tell Dad hello? comes her reply. Dad? How about Mom!, I protest. Or Steve. . . and don't forget cousin Judy!!! And then we are helpless with laughter, picturing her impending reunion with a host of equally irreverent Corleys clustered around a celestial percolator. She admits that she didn't get a quilt when Mom died -- she got our mother's afghan. Even better! I say. I got a quilt! I wanted the afghan!!! She assures me that I can tell her daughter, if she dies tonight, that I get the red afghan that our grandmother made for our mother. Oh, and don't forget to tell Mom 'hello', I urge.

I think her blood pressure might have been nearly normal by the time we finished talking.

I closed my own eyes and let the flood of fatigue overtake me after our call. I felt my body sink against the bed, and a haze of sleep rise to claim my brain.

On Thursday, I had basked in the sweetness of victory. I had pushed against the righteous indignation of a mother trying to prevent the normalization of her daughter's relationship with my client, and the righteousness of our position had prevailed. He had his first Friday overnight in several years last night as a result of his own diligence in pursuing unnecessary but certainly not unhelpful efforts to rehabilitate a problem that I believe never existed, which remediation he had agreed to undertaken at a time when he had no counsel. Whether the remediation was needed or not, he had completed it, and in the face of his former spouse's efforts to deny him his due, the judge, hearing our evidence, so decreed, and lifted the restrictions. I felt gratitude to have been even the instrument of this accomplishment, and made my way back to the office with the exhilarated feeling that is more reward than any payment could ever hope to be.

I looked into the eyes of defeat yesterday, in the person of a federal police officer at the moment he finally realized that his marriage was over. A sturdy, stocky fellow, with shaved head, a broad back, and a Fraternal Order pin on his lapel, this man had come into my office last summer with two requests: I want my kids and I want my house. In a day of intense negotiations with a respected colleague from parts East of here, I hammered out an agreement whereby he remained in his home, has his children three nights of each seven one week and two nights of seven the next, and pays a reduced but still high child support to his part-time teacher, much beloved, now former spouse. At hour four, the deal nearly done, and standing in the hallway in the Independence Courthouse, this man -- who learned to do braids on his own, and select dresses for his delightful daughters, and who was injured on deployment to Afghanistan while his wife, at home, launched the affair that would trigger her filing for divorce -- capsized into his brother's arms with anguish while I stood by, having no more clue how to console him that I ever have at such moments. After losing his wife to her desire not to serve as a patient Army wife any longer, he had also lost his career to that busted knee, and for the rest of his life, he will have bittersweet memories of both.

I do not know how I am supposed to be detached at such times. I cannot. I will not.

And yet, I appeared calm. I waited for his return from the sidewalk to which he had retreated, and when he returned, he spoke the words that I had counseled him to utter. All right, he said. Do it. And so, we did. They each climbed into the box and swore to tell the truth. She agreed that the marriage was irretrievably broken and could not be preserved. She forswore her right to maintenance, agreed to joint legal and joint physical custody, agreed to a reduced child support, and to the division of the stuff with which the marital home, now to be his, had been furnished. He assumed the seat after her and consented to the final brush of the scrivener's pen on a chapter of his life that had only brought him pleasure, or that he saw as only pleasurable now that it was closed. He carried my case to the car, and gave a whoop of relief while clasping his brother's out-stretched hand. And then he walked away. I heard the crisp chirp of his car alarm as he approached and climbed into it. I sat, unable to move, for some long moments, before starting my own car, and heading towards the highway.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 13 February 2010

Good morning,

Serenity surrounds me. The brown Beagle sleeps in her tattered bed; my old white cat has consumed her fill of water from the bathroom faucet and resumed her customary position, curled in a ball under the chair that stands beside the piano, in front of the register from which warm air flows, trickles, or blasts depending on the thermostat's whim. I haven't seen the fierce male cat since Thursday, but I am confident that one morning soon, he will appear with the newspaper on my stoop. I canceled his appointment at the vet due to a docket conflict, and he celebrates, instinctively knowing that his time as a rogue cannot endure much longer.

The front page startles me, spreading its word of death at the Olympics as I bend over it, coffee held away to avoid dripping. Sadness momentarily grips my heart, causing an ache that matches the sharp pain of the pulled muscle in my back, so that, briefly, my physical and emotional states coincide. Then I turn the page, take a long pull of hot caffeine, and settle against the smooth curve of the arrow-back chair.

My friend Penny has acquired a new art space, and later today, I will join a motley assemblage of VALA Gallery groupies in a clean-up and painting party. I'm hoping there will be plenty of coffee. There are just three weeks until the first opening there, in this bold new venue on Johnson Drive, in the old part of Mission, and there is much to be accomplished. We are none of us young enough to make work duty anything but a hilarious commentary on the possible ways in which one can discover muscles that have been abused or forgotten since the days when we roamed our respective childhood neighborhoods until the street lights flickered and our weary mothers summoned us to bath and bed from concrete stoops under the yellow glow of June-bug encrusted light bulbs.

The luscious leisurely days of childhood summer occupy a small, hidden corner of my mind. Lightening bugs intermittently called to us, hovering in the heavy cloud of fragrance rising from the dark expanses of newly-mown grass. On any given summer night, the old hand-mower might rest against the wide oak, beyond which, on the downward slope of the driveway, the thick green hose might lie, forgotten. Metal chairs with high rounded backs stood on the uncovered side of our porch, the side with small square drainage holes that my sister would occasionally clog with rocks so she could fill that side of the porch with water. I would sit in one of the painted chairs and dangle my feet into a cool rushing expanse, my own private swimming pool. That child was an innocent incarnation of this fifty-four year old, stuck on the porch from illness, or the invalid state of her legs, or maybe just because she did not dare compete with laughing boys running back and forth through the sprinkler's spray like banshees in the wild.

I close my eyes and summon sensations long resting unneeded in those creaky crevices of my subconscious. The piercing chill of snow cones, sweet, impossibly blue liquid sliding down their paper encasement. Sharp edges of a broken branch scraped against the sidewalk until a point forms, and on that point, the sticky mass of a marshmallow, turned black. Hot oozing foam pouring into my mouth as I lift that stick to break the burnt crust and get to the inner bounty. The fluttering specks of soot from a steady fire in the massive pit with its angled sides forming a square chimney from which the smoke rose to vanish into the blackness of the night sky. Stinging burns on the edge of my hand from fierce, purposeful whacks at a tether ball. High familiar voices, marking the count as the rest of us run for cover. The firm smooth expanse of the concrete well of our basement steps, where I huddled, night after night, hoping that I would not be found first, or last, in our game of hide and go seek.

On those same steps, with crumbled edges washed clean with a watering can's worth of water, I sat near my mother two decades later. I remember that she wore her customary wrap-around-skirt, one of many made from the same pattern -- in denim or cotton, plaid, solid or print. She settled onto a plastic stool that might be the very one which I now use to reach the top shelf of my bedroom closet. Taking a trowel into hands once smooth, now mottled with the brown badges of age, my mother sank its blade into the cold damp soil of a Missouri spring, turning, loosening, letting the soil's rich odor surround us. Last night, I had a vision, she said. I saw a white being. He told me that I have about a year left to live. I handed her a garden fork, with which she broke the fat clumps of dirt. I watched a worm squiggle free, followed by a frantic curly bug, which tightened into its shell and let itself roll away from her steady onslaught of careful preparation for the tomato seedlings standing at the ready in their cardboard flats. My mother's liquid brown eyes met the grey-blue eyes of her youngest daughter. I'm okay with that, she told me, and turned back to her work. I sat, useless and sad, leaning my back against the cinder block foundation of our home. How can you be okay, I screamed, but silently. How can you be all right with that! You'll never see me marry! You'll never meet my children! You'll never call them in at the first warm glow of the streetlights, to snuggle, as you read to them, in the old spring beds, pushed against the windows in the sunroom where their mother and her siblings slept. In the cool of that spring morning, with the heavy scent of freshly turned earth around me, I stared with rage and useless fury at her determined frame.

She died fifteen months later, less than a month shy of her fifty-ninth birthday. I cannot pass a compost pile without thinking of her, nor see the grave of an infant without remembering that she wanted to be buried in the unbaptised babies section of the Catholic cemetery, to keep watch over those forgotten children. The heavy smell of freshly baked bread causes me to fall into a sweet little dream about my mother, and standing next to her on the wooden stool, painted white that year, green the next. With a dish towel wrapped around my waist, secured with a clothes pin, I bellied up to the counter to learn to knead, pushing my small knuckles in my bit of dough, on its eager pile of flour, watching her smooth hands demonstrate, lifting my eyes to find approval in her face. Pungent wafts from rising yeast in warm water fill the kitchen. I flip my braids back over my shoulders, then push, and turn, and push and turn, until the sticky surface becomes smooth, and the dough is ready to plop into a china bowl slick with shortening. It will stand, covered with a clean white towel, on the heated stove, and rise, while my mother and I clean the counter, and wash the utensils. When the kitchen is neatened, I will go, with her hand in mine, into the breakfast room, and then, contented, I will sit, for a few idle moments, while she drinks Eight O'clock coffee from a melamine cup.

When I open my eyes,it is my heavy china mug of coffee then sends its steam rising in the room around me. I push back my chair and stand, lifting my arms high above my head and arching my back. I glance around, half-expecting to see a sneaker's rounded edge disappearing around the corner of the doorway to the next room and to hear the round ring of the ice-cream truck's entreaty. Giving my shoulders a tentative shrug, I move away from the table, and into the TV room, where I will do thirty minutes of yoga, before taking my aging self out into the world.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 06 February 2010

Good morning,

Above my small patch of the world, the sky stretches with a powerful greyness that threatens to ground my spirit. I pride myself in remaining cheerful regardless of the weather, but I feel oppressed by the steely expanse. I adjust the thermostat and add a layer to my amusing assemblage of clothing -- an old pair of socks, a nightgown, a T-shirt, a bed jacket.

These snowy days remind me of the long walks between my parents' house and our grade school. "I know, Ma," my son would groan. "Uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow.". We had three choices: down our street, McLaran Avenue, to West Florissant Road and straight through town; up our street and on to Jennings Station Road; or over a steep dead-end that took us to the railroad tracks.

Our house faced Kinamore Avenue, and to the northeast was Avis Road which ended in a stand of mulberry trees beside which lived the woman whom we called Aunt Agnes. We passed Aunt Agnes' small, white-framed home to descend the far side of the hill, and in those days, there was an old van lodged against the backside of the street, on which, if memory serves, there was a picture of a newly hatched chickie. Since we often came to that site to gather mulberries for my mother's baking, the street became known as Pick-A-Chick, and that is how I recalled it, sitting on the far side, on Carl Avenue, in a Ford Focus, on January 2, 2010.

The van has long since been hauled away, and perhaps had been at some point during my childhood. The mulberry grove has been thinned. I cannot recall the name of the family living in the large white house on the hill across from where Agnes lived with her many cats, but that family had special standing in the old days -- descendants of James Jennings, perhaps; or maybe a family whose father had relative wealth -- a doctor, maybe; a lawyer. Neighborhood legend held that the streets of the original section of Jennings were named for Mr. Jennings' daughters -- Avis, and Ada, and perhaps Carl was a son or brother. I had not realized until now that the road running parallel to the train tracks bears the name "Main Street", and I am somewhat amused -- the houses along its southern edge are small, nondescript, and anything but glorious.

To the north of that inauspicious row of dwellings, the railroad tracks run downtown and into Illinois by way of the Merchant's Bridge. They cross McLaran just before the street makes a turn and runs east, to Jennings Station Road and on into Baden, ending at N. Broadway just west of the Mississippi River, past small, old houses in crumbling neighborhoods that once held the families of children with whom I went to grade school. To the north of those railroad tracks is a short stretch of road called Huiskamp Avenue, which dove-tails into Shirley Avenue, which in turn ends at Clinton Avenue, just blocks from the site of Corpus Christi Elementary School on Switzer Avenue, which Google tells me is now called "Corpus Christi District School", a fact that my fifty-four-year-old self finds astonishing.

On a grey day much like this one, in the drab weeks between Christmas and Easter, when nothing ever happens, my brother Mark and I walked over Pick-A-Chick and descended the short stretch of cold, broken pavement, turning left on Carl to reach the place where we would climb to cross the railroad tracks and continue our journey on the back end of Switzer and thus to school. From our house to Corpus Christi was a solid mile, more by the front route, less if you took the shortcut as we were doing on that day. I wore the heavy navy blue jumper of a second grader, with a short-sleeve, Peter Pan color white shirt, a navy cardigan, heavy Brogues and knee-socks, and a coat that probably had been handed down through three sisters and doubtless had seen better days. I don't recall of what the boys' uniform consisted; probably it involved navy blue pants of some type and a white shirt similar to mine. With my old eyes closed, bowing my head a bit to concentrate, I have a recollection of Mark's blond hair, heavy black glasses, and a plaid coat, probably lined with quilting. I see the earnest expression on his face as he coaxed me up the grade to the thick, sturdy surface of the railroad ties over which the cold steel tracks ran. With two fat braids flying from under my round, flat beanie, an old knit scarf wrapped around my neck and tucked into the thin wool of my coat, I struggled to settle my foot into the spaces between the loose gravel spewing down the side of the hill.

Mark crossed the tracks and turned to watch as I made the last step up onto the tracks themselves. His face wore the heavy mixture of kindness and impatience with which the strong always greet the beloved weak. Shifting my book bag, intent, I stepped forward and slightly swayed, then stood still, in between the two rails, to get my balance.

He heard the heavy sound of the train before the whistle blew. Then came the engineer's warning, long, low and mournful. "Come on," he urged. His face lost its slackness and I saw only worry, the fleeting thoughts -- he promised Mom, I am sure, to see me safely to school; we would be late for Mass; his friends would laugh as we rushed into the back of the old brick church. "Come on, Mary, come on. You can do it," he told me, but I had lost my capacity for movement and stood, the carved statue of a seven-year-old Catholic school girl, suitably clad, red-plaid scarf dangling, mittens on their string, the strap of her book bag tenderly slipping down one arm, as the train made its inevitable approach.

I saw it. It came from the west, heading towards Illinois and the mining country, the frozen bleak farmlands, perhaps on, into Indiana. A round light shone on the front of the engine. The air around me, sharp with winter's cold, seemed to quiver with the nearing weight of the iron beast. Still I did not move, and still I heard my brother's voice, calling me to the other side and the mundane safety of our last stretch to school. The train kept coming.

Moving more swiftly than I might have expected, had my mind not been numb, Mark reached, grabbed my arm with one hand and my book-bag with the other, and pulled as hard as his nine-year-old frame would allow. I toppled, sending him backward, and landing on top of him with a quiet thump as the train raced by and the whistle blew, chiding us this time, reminding us of all the earnest warnings our mother had ever meted out. "Don't walk on the railroad tracks," she had cautioned, endlessly, often, urgently. We lay, winded, unbelieving, for some seconds, maybe minutes, before Mark shoved me away and stood, brushing dirt from his pants and turning to scramble over to the street. "Let's get going," he said, gruffly, and I followed, adjusting my clothing, replacing the strap on my shoulder, nervously smoothing the ends of my braids.

When I was a prosecutor, defense attorneys would try to wheedle special treatment out of me with whiny tales of their clients' difficult childhoods. I would push back my chair, fold my arms and invite them to bring their burglars, thieves and robbers to my table. "I'll match them, story for story, about terrible times, and if I run out of stories before they do, I'll dismiss all charges." No one ever accepted my challenge. It is true, I must admit, that we had a tough life in many ways. My father drank, rarely worked, and had a terrible temper. I could have given most of their clients a run for their money, and probably outpaced many. I have wondered, often, why such persons turn to crime, while I have not. As I pour my third cup of coffee, and nibble half a Wolferman's English muffin, I look out onto the wintry sky and think, perhaps, I understand at last.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley