August 13, 2009

We squared off...

caryrandolph:

…in front of his sister Lisa’s Celica on that slow, hot afternoon, I with the throb of a mosquito bite desperate to be scratched. Already July, the summer had settled into that eternal shuffle from bed to yard, from sofa to pool, and back again until days did not move forward or back but rather in figure-eights with the Sega console acting as crucifix. At that hour Lisa had turned us out of the house, so dire was her need for absolute silence during Days of Our Lives. Now we loitered, throwing rocks at the mailbox and dragging our Keds along the edge of the driveway where concrete collided with crabgrass. I was seven years old - more concerned with chasing sisters on my pink and yellow Huffy than chasing boys - and he, this boy, was not merely a boy but the babysitter’s kid brother. He was smarmy, and he left empty potato chip bags in the pantry, and when I dared to claim shotgun, he reaffirmed his omnipotence and the futility of my mortal dreams with tear-inducing Indian rug burns. Anthony was the bane of my summer’s existence.

“I dare you to say a bad word,” he said, leaned against the hood of the Celica, chin aloft.

I hesitated. I ran through my father’s laundry list of preferred outbursts, uttered, for the most part, in his Marlboro smoke-filled basement office or while chipping wiffle golf balls in the backyard or attempting to start the outboard motor, untangle the garden hose, replace the record player needle, reorganize his collection of 45s that I had carelessly strewn across the living room floor, scrape melted Crayola crayon off the car seat, spread fertilizer on the lawn, fix my bicycle chain, fix the screen door, beat the Dow, quit smoking, survive another church service, survive another hangover, pick up another bag of ice, unearth his cummerbund, hitch up the boat trailer, discipline my latest shenanigan. But where words should have been I only heard cicada drone. Finally I showed my cards. “Damn,” I said. I might as well have brandished a couple spades, a club, nothing adding up to 21.

“Damn?” Anthony sneered.

“Yeah, now it’s your turn.” No way he could beat my D word.

He crossed his arms and propped one foot on the fender, a nine-year-old James Dean. Somewhere down the street a lawn mower blade hit a pebble patch, and inside my house the refrigerator door opened and shut. Anthony didn’t miss a beat.

“Fucker,” he said.

“Fucker?” What kind of bullshit was that?! Oh, but now, after I’d had my turn, I could finally remember “bullshit”. A reticent rebel, this girl.

“Yeah, fucker. It’s the Worst Word.”

Lisa emerged from the living room. Days was over, and I had a coloring book to fill. “Fucker” was forgotten.

August came. My cousins clattered down the dock at Point Breeze, their fishing poles of no more use, the crab trap full, and the sun setting. There were oyster shells to dip in Day Glo colors (for necklace stringing), cookies to sneak from the pantry, string beans to snap off the vine. I had to run to keep up with my mother, who might have carried the bait box or maybe just carried my kid sister, and when I finally did catch up, I employed my preferred method of seizing her attention: I swatted her on the ass until she paid attention.

“What’s up, Noodle?” she asked.

What was up was my raging curiosity so without warning, without lowering my voice, without any regard for the significance that these few seconds and fewer syllables would have as a bookmark in my childhood and her loss of a first, an oldest, a baby, I said simply, “What does ‘fucker’ mean?”

And that, reader, is the first time I ever said the F word.
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August 3, 2009

But it should...

caryrandolph:

…come as no surprise that this born Yankee with a Southern accent sometimes does not quite know where she belongs. A couple months ago I was on the phone with my mama. I asked her where in the world she is happiest. She said, “Back home. Hanging out on the deck in Irvington, [Virginia], drinking Jack Daniels, and looking out onto the water.”

“And when you are at home in Missouri?” I asked. “Because you’re only ever in Irvington a couple weeks each year.”

“Sitting by the pool,” she said. “And drinking Jack Daniels.”

My mother has spent twenty-one years searching for water.

If you pull a rubber band tightly enough it will either break or spring back, popping into the air between your fingers. So too do I feel stretched sometimes between the one and the other, the y’all-drawlin’ ruffian running barefoot through land-locked Jasper County and her Eastern seaboard-obsessed twin.

When I moved to the city a new friend took me to my first Rangers game. I told his friends upon introduction, “Well, I was raised in Missouri, but I’m technically from Connecticut.”

“Don’t tell them that,” he said. “Missouri makes you different. Own it.”

That was six months ago, and still I beat on, my boat against the current. I run and I run and I run, and I live on an island, yet I can never seem to find any water.

•

Four weeks into my Hamptons...

caryrandolph:

…marathon training schedule, and I have already slipped from my rah-rah enthusiasm of day one. Last week (the third for those of you who can subtract), I ran just two days out of seven. Two. I didn’t loll on the sofa all week; there was certainly a fair amount of romping and wave-diving and skateboard-shredding, but when the sun set on Sunday evening and left me to face my margarita and paperback sans sweat, I felt like a big fat loser, emphasis on the fat part.

Therefore come Monday I determined to put serious mileage behind me. I hit the Hudson River Park just as the sun touched the Jersey skyline…and just as a couple of fake-baked Abercrombie brosephs rounded the corner at 41st.

Normally when boys catch up to me on the trail I let them pass. Not all are faster, of course, but most of them breeze by, and I chalk it up to biology. However these two gents, if gents they be, jogged at such a pace that if you had pushed your baby stroller in the opposite direction, you’d have rightfully assumed that I in my 2004 frat tee and these Hollister models were running together, like we were friends or some other nonsense. Bitches, please.

So I did what I always do when girls close in on my heels. I dropped a cinder block on my mental gas pedal and crept past Bill and Ted. Read this bullshit! They picked up the pace! They tried to keep up with me! And for a while they almost had me beat. One would sneak ahead and then glance over his shoulder at his manpatriot with this look of complete disdain, like, who does this girl think she is but maybe I should ask for her digits, and then I’d pull in front as if to say, Ask me out, I dare you. We’ll go to TGIFriday’s, and then he would pass me, and back and forth, and I don’t even remember what I was blasting on the iPod at the moment that helped me run so fast, but I’m pretty sure it was Akon, which makes sense because Akon always makes me hustle due to its aural equivalency of a Bacardi and Coke, and then finally - finally! - I stopped feeling their brosephness in such close and sweaty proximity, and I looked deep into the recesses of my periph. Once again and happily, I was running alone.
•

I've had this experience only...

caryrandolph:

…once or twice in my adulthood: full awareness in a small, private moment, that my heart, once thought full, has gained capacity. It feels most like those last few seconds before welling tears become a real cry, but this is not the feeling of catharsis (as a good cry should be), not the feeling of letting something go. It is literally the sensation that your heart has become enlarged, has taken on the blessing (never a burden) of heavier weight, of greater responsibility, of space where there had previously been none, of matter - once thought to be neither created nor destroyed - now existing, now expanding, now rushing fast in what is literally a cage, but defying that cage, bursting past it, becoming more, more, when you had long since grown comfortable with whatever you had. What you had, of course, was plenty, was fine. But what you have now, in this moment and ever after until it happens again, is even better.
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Cary Randolph: Live from New York

caryrandolph:

After twenty-four years of scribbing, dreaming, and drafting my Great American Novel in covert at-work emails, I can finally call myself a professional writer. As of today I am my hometown newspaper’s freshest blogger-at-large, reporting from the trenches of Murray Hill, Midtown, and Madison Square (among other frequently frequented ‘hoods). Although the material is definitely penned with my fellow Missourians in mind, feel free to peruse more of my Manhattan musings and find out (finally) where [Hometown] really is and the hard truth about my last name. (Hint: it isn’t Randolph.) Mazel tov to me, and cross your fingers for a book deal!
•

caryrandolph:

I had not planned to go out on January 27, 2005, but of course those nights always take a turn for the most memorable. I wore a black Lacoste polo, Seven jeans, and red lipstick. I stepped back from the mirror, that sparkling, never smudged Delta Gamma bathroom looking glass, and decided that my look needed something. Kick. So I took my comb, and I staked out the point smack dab between my eyebrows and a couple inches above, and I raked the comb back, plowing a line a la Moses between the creative and analytical sides of my cranium. Thus was born my unconditional, oft-volatile love affair with the center part.

The bash, by the way, was a phenomenal affair hosted by several strapping young varsity baseball players. We ripped hot pink Bacardi shots and snapped many incriminating photos, a few of which you see above. One dude remarked (inaccurately) that I looked like Nicole Kidman, and I obviously never forgot it (having been flattered of course; remember that this was four years ago and her face didn’t resemble a wax replica of a balloon puppy).

Aside: When these were taken, I was twenty pounds lighter. Fuck you, metabolism. I can run and run and run till I bleed and eat lettuce till I sprout rabbit ears, and my ass still expands. This is bullshit.

Anyway over the next two years my part moved back and forth across the top of my head, forming a follicular barometer for my mood at any given moment. A far right part complete with swishing bang suggested fraternal convention; didn’t I want to look like every other gal in Greektown? I shifted to the left upon reading that one should always place her part on the side of the face she’d like to look thinner; the line created an optical illusion. But by senior year I was convinced of the center part’s cool factor and determined to make it part of my “mystique.” A trademark, much as my red and hot pink lipstick (and pill-popping crazy) had been in the DG house. And when I cut my bangs on January 12, 2008, I cast a controversial die: as they grew out and in my attempts to hide the regrettable chop, my part would have to fall squarely down the middle, and it was then that the familial squawking began.

My mother to this day literally corners me and shove her hands in my face, mussing the perfectly Chi-ed locks, brushing the bangs to the side. When she lined us up on the dock at Irvington for the annual family Christmas card ninth ring of hell, she actually paid me to forgo the center part. At the dinner table even Daddy chimed in. The family took a vote: lose the Red Sea tress divide. But there was no budging for that line.

Until Sunday when I, hungover and bloated from two weekends of straight beach boozing, scrutinized MAM’s photo documentation of our exceptionally awesome Fourth of July and realized, finally, that while the center part looks cool to me in the mirror, it’s awesomeness, its edginess, its incredible transformative power of elevating me from “just another blonde with her Southern sororal side swoop” to icon of individual style on par with CZ Guest (center) and Jackie O (center), was all - literally - in my head. Standing in front of his mirror, Hall and Oates blasting from the iPhone speakers, blow dryer in one hand, nose beginning to peel, heart as full as my chipmunk cheeks, I stuck a thumb in my hairline just above the iris of my left eye and raked it back.
•
caryrandolph: Surely some meaning can be derived from my chronology of chronographs. When first infatuated with timepieces my wrist looked vaguely similar to the one above, laden with silver bangles and my mother’s charms and a Swiss Army knock-off found deep in the bowels of Chinatown. High school graduation brought the Tag Heuer I wear now - a spartan stainless steel affair that perfectly marries the masculine and feminine and is currently married to my grandmother’s sterling I.D., a gift from her naval lieutenant brother Jack. Every time I go home I take off my Tag at the dinner table. My father asks, “Is your ticker ticking?” and shakes it, holds it to his ear, rebukes me for its most recent scrapes, and then expounds on the merits of wearing men’s watches. I’ve heard it since I was old enough to read an analog, Daddy’s lecture that no daughter of his should wear a lady watch, if only because those prissy bracelets lose their value with time. At seventeen, standing over that glass case, in love with an automatic, not even Papa Randolph could deter me. But oh, I see how I was mistaken! How only a man’s watch is good enough, how even that fake Canal Street chrono (because it always goes back to New York now, doesn’t it?) is more my speed, how they appreciate more with time, how I appreciate more my father’s advice, six years later, and how I’d give anything to dig up all that old silver jewelry and stack it wrist to elbow and remember being sixteen and getting drunk off two Zimas and falling down the stairs. Which is how, since you asked, I lost the birdcage charm and possibly the anchor, and why, although they have since been retrieved, they now rest unappreciated in my grandmother’s old jewelry box, stamped in gold with her initials on top. Thus I plan to wrap up 2009 with my wrist wrapped in metal, reviving in some small detail my youth and all the family ghosts and all the good advice, and I will start, in part, with this purchase, the Timex military, at least until Christmas brings me chance to pilfer my pop’s top drawer. (Photo, as usual, via Tea & Strumpets.)

caryrandolph:

Surely some meaning can be derived from my chronology of chronographs. When first infatuated with timepieces my wrist looked vaguely similar to the one above, laden with silver bangles and my mother’s charms and a Swiss Army knock-off found deep in the bowels of Chinatown. High school graduation brought the Tag Heuer I wear now - a spartan stainless steel affair that perfectly marries the masculine and feminine and is currently married to my grandmother’s sterling I.D., a gift from her naval lieutenant brother Jack.

Every time I go home I take off my Tag at the dinner table. My father asks, “Is your ticker ticking?” and shakes it, holds it to his ear, rebukes me for its most recent scrapes, and then expounds on the merits of wearing men’s watches. I’ve heard it since I was old enough to read an analog, Daddy’s lecture that no daughter of his should wear a lady watch, if only because those prissy bracelets lose their value with time. At seventeen, standing over that glass case, in love with an automatic, not even Papa Randolph could deter me.

But oh, I see how I was mistaken! How only a man’s watch is good enough, how even that fake Canal Street chrono (because it always goes back to New York now, doesn’t it?) is more my speed, how they appreciate more with time, how I appreciate more my father’s advice, six years later, and how I’d give anything to dig up all that old silver jewelry and stack it wrist to elbow and remember being sixteen and getting drunk off two Zimas and falling down the stairs. Which is how, since you asked, I lost the birdcage charm and possibly the anchor, and why, although they have since been retrieved, they now rest unappreciated in my grandmother’s old jewelry box, stamped in gold with her initials on top.

Thus I plan to wrap up 2009 with my wrist wrapped in metal, reviving in some small detail my youth and all the family ghosts and all the good advice, and I will start, in part, with this purchase, the Timex military, at least until Christmas brings me chance to pilfer my pop’s top drawer.

(Photo, as usual, via Tea & Strumpets.)

•

Over salty bisque and...

caryrandolph:

…saltier risotto Sweet Baby Jane told me a Sunday story. In June she flew to Cudjoe Key to visit her boy MFB, a beach bum who spends his days spear-fishing, snorkeling, and being otherwise phenomenal. (Sounds vaguely familiar.) She had not seen him in a month so she expected, upon arrival at Miami International, a vast bouquet of fresh Dutch tulips or, at the very least, a single wilted gas station carnation. He met her at baggage claim empty-handed.

As they pulled onto the highway, though, M. brandished a plate wrapped in tin foil. “Most guys would get their girlfriends flowers,” he said. “But I think you’ll like this better.” She unwrapped the aluminum parcel to find inside a lobster, steamed and peeled and drowning in butter. He had speared it for her that afternoon off the blinding Florida coast. 

The boy gave my sister a lobster.

And as we drained the pinot gris, as we polished off the last bites of bisque, Jane said to me, “Falling in love isn’t all about the man, you know. It’s about who you are when you fall in love with him, and where, and the season. It’s about the time of year and the stupid shit you do together. He taught me how to gut the mahi-mahi. And eventually I’ll take him hiking. And then, you know, it’s about the seasons changing and still loving him in spite of it.”

And the crustaceans! Oh my God, it’s about the crustaceans. 

•

Hark back to those golden years...

caryrandolph:

…before iPods, before Gmail, somewhere between AOL and AIM, at the height of Carson Daly and Total Request Live, and remember, will you. Take this voyage with me down memory lane, this journey to transcend your Wednesday malaise, remember what it was like to be all of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen and without cell phone.

Remember, please, calling your varsity Lotharios after dinner, after homework had been fucked with and doodled on and stuffed back in the Trapper Keeper, and just hanging out on the phone. Remember your daddy picking up another receiver somewhere in the house and hitting speed dial without first checking for a dial tone, remember your kid brother eavesdropping on yet another line as you mumbled those confidential utterances of undying lunch room lust and longing and Oh my God, can you believe Crystal made out with Travis IN THE PARKING LOT? What a slut. I heard she can’t even afford Lucky jeans. Remember the first hour or so of lively conversation seguing into something less energetic though not at all half-hearted. Nay! You waited all day for this phone call! You saw him but twice in the hall between classes and the first time didn’t even count because he was hauling ass to the cafeteria to beat the line because it was, after all, pizza day…

All day you waited to hear him breathe on the other end of the phone while he wrapped up his latest round of Halo to then dissect the goings-on at last Friday’s keg party and hopefully, hopefully! casually! mention the upcoming semi-formal, which will not be semi-formal at all but will involve you wearing floor-length sequins and him in a royal blue button-down with a Hanes tee peaking out from beneath, only to be exposed when, on the dance floor, he and his buddies all unbutton their royal blue button-downs, oh God, it happens every single time, but you don’t care, because you and your girls are too busy doing the Electric Slide…

Remember cradling that hot cordless phone under your chin as you threw the next day’s outfit onto your window seat and then brushing your teeth and - hold, please! - washing your face with Noxzema and cleaning the gunk off your retainers and sorry, sweetie, this thing gives me a lisp. Remember then getting into bed and - my bad, just one second, GOOD NIGHT, MOM!, and turning out the lights and turning on your new Dave Matthews CD ever so softly…

And this is where the magic happens, this is where the conversation with your one true love takes a turn for the glorious, this is where you start in on the real soul-search conversation. Remember the top-five lists, the favorite bands of all time, the Let’s go to a concert together, maybe make it a double date, and I really like frappucinos; don’t you like frappucinos? and I think Shawna and Tyler are having sex, can you believe it? But they’re really in love, they’ve been together all semester, and so what do boys think is the difference between talking and dating and going out? and lots of heavy breathing, oh my God, so much heavy breathing and also, Are you tired? No, are you tired? No, what are you doing? Nothing, what are you doing? and What are you listening to? “Stairway to Heaven”; what are you listening to? Oh, just that mix CD you gave me last Saturday when we were hanging out in your parents’ basement, you know the one with all the Matchbox 20 on it, the one that starts with that P. Diddy slow jam I like, the one we swayed to at that farm party…

And before you know it, your clock-radio reads four a.m., and you’re not even talking anymore! You’re just listening to each other sigh and roll over and maybe whisper What? Huh? Oh, nothing, until finally you say in that meek, exhausted half-whisper, Well, I guess I should go to sleep, I’ll see you at the student council meeting, and don’t forget to bring duct tape for that triangle-trade project (y’all, tell me you remember the triangle trade), God, our teacher is such a bitch making us do this group effing project, I mean spring break starts in THREE DAYS. Anyway, you hang up first. You hang up first! No, you hang up first! I love you! I love you more! No, I love you more! And then the battery dies.

•

We visited the house in Gloucester...

caryrandolph:

…every summer, the house that faced the water, the house at the end of the long dirt road, and I remember it as a vast rambling affair with hallways that stretched forever and secret rooms behind paneled doors. It was my grandfather’s summer home, and it was a bucolic place where cigarette smoke formed the only clouds, where everyone arrived by boat, and where not even strains of Motown on the stereo could drown out the cicadas’ drone. Gloucester, Virginia, locked forever in a salt-water snowglobe, is my summer standard.

But it wasn’t perfect. My mother tells me this. The house was not a refuge at all but a stage on which so much dysfunction came to life. The kitchen was cramped and rainy afternoons eternal when she had nothing to entertain ten crying children but a single television station. The messy politics of a Southern family and the ghosts of heartbreaks past stirred in the ceiling fans like fog blowing off the Severn River. Point Breeze was wonderful, too; she assures me of this, and photo albums stuffed full with three-by-fives serve as proof that there was in fact far more fun had on that long river lawn than her memories suggest.

Somewhere, then, we are both right, and we are both wrong. My Gloucester was not flawless, and hers was more so. Dinners could be long, dramatic affairs - and they could also be peaceful. My father always arrived late, having traveled the twelve hundred miles on his BMW motorcycle. It happened only once, but in my mind it was the rule. Perception has been distorted faster than a Polaroid in a fire.

But we both remember, my mother and I, the wet bar, tucked in a bottleneck between kitchen and dining room, and the sight of her father slicing limes on the counter. Lime after lime after lime and a few lemons, cut and squeezed over Tom Collinses and carried three at a time to cousins spinning tales or spinning into and out of one another’s arms on that wide, essential wrap-around porch, a porch that, should we visit it today, would surely be just as wide as we both remember it then.

***

About Gloucester my mother says this:

The porch was wide, as wide as we both remember it. Do you remember the heat? You cannot write about summer in the South without talking about the heat. And they didn’t want to run the inefficient air conditioning because it cost too much.

I remember: it’s the middle of the night; I’m not kidding, maybe 2:30 a.m., and your aunt and I meet in the hallways and on the porch downstairs. She’s holding your cousin N, and I’m holding you, and you’re probably six weeks old and N three weeks old. And we have to keep you quiet because your grandparents are asleep, and God knows we don’t want to wake them up. So we’re walking and pacing and exhausted, and we don’t even talk. We just look at each other as we pass in the hallways and sigh. It’s so hot. We’re tired. We miss my mom.

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