Spoons and Thimbles
Every year Carl and Ann would split their two weeks of vacation into two trips of a week each and travel the world in that way middle-class Americans do — snapping shots at Niagara Falls or the Eiffel Tower, sleeping in three-star motels, taking tours led by chattering women who needed paid hobbies now that the kids left home, and buying souvenirs. It started on their honeymoon with the decorative spoon from the Grand Canyon and a case to store it and all the future spoons in, and then came the pewter thimble from a twee gift shoppe in Vermont near the Von Trapp Lodge. It didn’t take long for the walls of their home to hold case after case of spoons not meant for food and thimbles not meant for sewing, such that little actual wall remained, but Carl didn’t mind. He started making the cases in his woodshop at the back of the garage, switching on the space heater in winter and mitering wood until his fingers went numb from the cold, Car Talk reruns murmuring in the background from the beat-up and paint-speckled radio. One could say that the collecting became an obsession, but when does it not? One could say that instead of spoons and thimbles as purposeful residue from planned trips, planned spoons and thimbles dictated their next destinations until age slowed their travels, Carl long since retired from Dupont and Anne too long away from the classroom to miss the sticky hands of her kindergarteners now full grown with children of their own. You could say the first spoon to come unhitched was the one from Epcot of a Mickey silhouette made of flags. Anne couldn’t remember the trip, or she got it mixed up with the time they went to California Adventure — something about the way all things Disney smeared together into treacle and sentiment. No sense in keeping it. The next object — what should have been a thimble full of memories — was a thimble from the Great Wall of China reduced to vapor, gone as it was from Anne’s mind. Carl sent it and a few others to the rummage sale at the church, and so they all eventually went. Cases and spoons and thimbles donated as each came unstitched. If there is no longer a time when Carl toppled off the camel in Egypt and no longer a time when Anne twisted her ankle at The Cloisters, there is only a gold spoon affixed with a miniature cloisonné sphynx and a pewter thimble embellished with a unicorn amulet. Objects shed as their lives grew smaller and Anne’s bank of memories was plundered by the indiscriminate theft of dementia until there was only one case left: Thimble from the Grand Tetons. A real silver spoon from Baja. A pewter spoon from Aruba, affixed with the tiniest shells she ever saw. Thimble of fake gold from the gold country. Jade spoon from Laos. Copper thimble from Notre Dame. Decorative spoon from the Grand Canyon. Pewter thimble from the Von Trapp Lodge. For the service, these last two — these first two — tucked into her hands.
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Coital Headache
after “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”
If you give a woman a new home along the panhandle in San Francisco, she’s going to follow the MUNI cables all the way to nightclubs of house music synched to flashing lights, her cosmopolitan a cocktail glass of liquid confetti, her body quivering out from tremors the epicenter of which originate in her pants, and if she follows the MUNI cables to nightclubs, she’ll end up finding her way into a dance hall of only ladies, some clasped together as single shadows in each corner, and if she finds herself in a dance hall of only ladies, Prince’s “Kiss” is going to play, and if “Kiss” plays, she’s going to take all six feet of her taut self to the floor and grind against everything her evangelical mother warned her about — everything having bangs dyed pink and a nose ring and a mouth that says please kiss — and if she grinds and kisses, she’s going to have to get everything’s number but then go home to her boyfriend and act like his touch doesn’t nauseate her, and if she tries to maintain this double life, she’s going to develop intense headaches that only happen when her boyfriend pleasures her with the sparkly pink vibrator shaped like a dolphin, and if she gets these terrifying pains during sex, she’s going to visit the student health center where a nurse practitioner suggests that she probably has an aneurysm, and if the nurse practitioner tells her that she’s likely got an aneurysm, she’s going to remember how her grandmother’s cousin had an aneurysm and was in a coma for a decade, and if she thinks about the cousin, she’s going to assume that she’s doomed, too, thanks to genetic disposition, and if she harbors the certainty that she’s doomed, she’s going to end up in the emergency room having a panic attack because she thinks she’s dying, and if she finds herself wearing an ID bracelet and talking to an ER doctor with a unibrow who diagnoses her with something called coital headache, which — get this — is triggered by internalized feelings of guilt, because that’s what the big medical book said when the doc showed it to her, she’s going to go home with a prescription for Xanax, and if she goes home with a prescription and diagnosis that she’s only guilty but not dying, she’s going to leave her boyfriend the next night, and if she leaves the boyfriend that she’s dated since junior year of high school and who she moved to San Francisco with, she’s going to have to ugly cry and move out of the home along the panhandle in San Francisco, and if she moves out of the house along the Panhandle, she’s going to follow the MUNI cables all the way to a neighborhood just over the ridge of fog where everything waits for her.