Title: Message
from a Blue Jay
Genre: Creative Nonfiction,
Memoir-in-Essays
Author: Faye Rapoport DesPres
Website: www.FayeRapoportDesPres.com
Publisher: Buddhapuss Ink LLC
Purchase from Amazon
From
an astonishing blue jay to a lone humpback whale, from the back roads of her
hometown to the streets of Jerusalem and the Tower of London, debut author Faye
Rapoport DesPres examines a modern life marked by a passion for the natural
world, unexpected love, and shocking loss, and her search for a place she can
finally call home in this beautifully crafted memoir-in-essays.
Three weeks before DesPres's fortieth birthday, nothing about her
life fit the usual mold. She is single, living in a rented house in Boulder,
Colorado, fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software
start-up that soon won't exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from
summer wildfires, she decides to take stock of her nomadic life and find the
real reasons she never "settled down." The choices she makes from
that moment on lead her to retrace her steps-in the States and abroad-as she
attempts to understand her life. But instead of going back, she finds herself
moving forward to new love, horrible loss, and finally, in a way that she never
expected, to a place she can almost call home.
Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of rising contemporary writers such as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman will appreciate Faye's observational eye, her passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and her search for the surprising truths behind the events of our daily lives.
CHAPTER ONE
No One Watches the Old Lady Dance
The
sun warms my legs as they lie on the edge of a white plastic lawn chair. I have
always felt critical when I look at my legs, at least since the age of
fourteen. They are, after all, too large, too muscular, marked in places with
small, white keloid scars. I remind myself that these legs are strong; in a few
weeks they will have carried me through forty years. Just this week they hiked
to the summit of Mount Sanitas, a quarter mile from the house I rent in
Boulder, Colorado. Yet I wrestle with ambivalence about my hips, and soon I
look away. My body and me, approaching middle age, not speaking.
A chill in the air forecasts fall. I cross my
arms, trying to snuggle more tightly into my old, worn-out sweatshirt. The
flower garden is tangled and ragged, retreating from its summer glory. A few
red and white roses remain. They bask in the sunshine among the remnants of
what was once a chorus of colors transformed daily by blooms. My arms cramp up.
I reach above my head, grasp one hand in the other, and stretch, feeling my
shoulders pop.
Above my head, magpies quarrel with two
squirrels in a canopy of leaves. The grass is lush now, neatly mowed, a green
gift of the September rains that have washed away the parched, brown summer.
Cool air trickles into my lungs. I attempt a deep breath, but my chest feels
shallow. Three years ago when I moved to Colorado, I was thirty-six and alone.
I’d traveled from New York to Boston, then to England, New York again, Israel,
and back to New York. Wherever I landed, my life started, stopped, revved up
again, sputtered. I could never get comfortable. Things kept falling apart.
I had hoped that Boulder, on the edge of the
mountains and inviting to thirty-somethings without wedding rings, would become
my home. This hope persisted for a couple of years. I’ve loved living among the
skiers and the bike paths, but now I’m restless again. I’m still alone, and
soon I’ll be forty. Does the tightness in my chest reflect a sense of
foreboding? It could be simpler than that—caused only by the smoke and haze
hanging in the sky after a summer of blazing wildfires.
I’ve been told that life is less painful if you
stay in the present, dismiss the past, and avoid thoughts of the future. Be
here, now. So I try to stay here, with my breath and the smoke and the sky and
the sun on my skin. But memories beat their fists at my door and beckon through
the windows with crooked fingers. I am tempted and give in; my mind slips out.
I see an eleven-year-old girl. A boy is teasing
her, calling her “button chest.” She is embarrassed by the changes in her body.
She wants to run fast like the boys. Her mother is at home doing laundry,
depressed. The girl doesn’t want to end up like her mother. She doesn’t like
dolls; she wants to be strong. Her body is betraying her.
Now the girl is thirteen. They didn’t let her
join the Little League team; they won’t let her play soccer at school. She
joins the gymnastics team. She has dark eyes, pigtails, and a clear-skinned
face. She dances on the mat, dips down and stretches, moves in time with the
recorded music. She reaches toward the audience, turns and stands straight,
pauses for a moment at the corner of the mat. She raises herself on her toes as
the music speeds up. Then she runs, turns and twists, tumbles in the air, and
lands standing on the mat, arms up. Her chin lifts, and she flashes a smile.
The audience applauds. The judges’ pencils move quickly across clipboards.
Older selves replace the thirteen-year-old girl.
They appear and recede at a distance. A high school girl in a peasant costume
sings “Matchmaker” on an auditorium stage. She is told her performance was
affecting, but the next day she pulls on her gymnastics leotard and stares at
her body in the mirror. She is embarrassed by the size of her hips. At the end
of the day she writes in her diary, listing every calorie she put in her mouth.
The boys eye the cheerleaders who have slim, perfect legs, wear lipgloss, and
blow-dry their hair. She knows that is what it means to be pretty, and she also
knows she is not that. She wants the boys to like her, but not for the things
that she wishes she could make disappear.
A college student with long, unkempt hair, in
patched blue jeans and a Grateful Dead t-shirt sits alone at the edge of a pond
near her dorm. During summer break, her boyfriend visits. He lifts her shirt
and glances at her backside. “Not bad,” he says. She is glad that she has not
gained weight.
A woman
in Boston, twenty-seven now, says
a tearful good-bye to a man who is leaving. She should not bother to cry. She
won’t see him again for five years, and when she does she will no longer care.
But I can’t tell her this; she stops eating and drops to 103 pounds. She thinks
her reflection in the mirror finally looks good, but her friends at work ask if
she is sick. She leaves. She boards a plane for Israel, where she lives in the
desert and takes Hebrew classes. She starts eating again and begins to gain
weight, and berates herself for starting to look heavy.
She hikes through the desert and swims in the
Dead Sea. She sings “On My Own” from Les
Misérables at a small coffeehouse, accompanied by a pianist. The people at
the tables clap their hands. She has given another great performance.
I am back
in the garden, watching one of the squirrels make his way down a tree toward
the roses. Upside down, he clings to the bark and stops to lift his head,
assessing any danger I might present. “I won’t bother you,” I tell him. The
squirrel understands and continues his descent. I glance at a nearby Tupperware
dish to be sure there is water inside. I started leaving water for the
squirrels after one of them followed me around one morning in the middle of the
scorching summer. I was watering the flowers, and he drank from the end of the
hose.
How I crave a sip of my own gentleness.
Friends have been relentless in their crusade to
convince me that forty is not old. It’s a beginning, they explain, not an end.
“Remember,” one said, “on your birthday you are just one day older.” Still, I
sense that I am running out of time.
My mind slips away again. The woman,
twenty-nine, is back in the States. She sits in a doctor’s office. She is
shaking, her mother beside her. Now she is wheeled into an operating room. She
panics, and the nurses sedate her. A hot, white light hangs above her head. She
sees masked faces. Hands pat her arms gently in an attempt to offer comfort.
Voices grow softer, more distant. Tears slide down her cheeks. She has a tumor.
They will fix it, but she will never have children.
Her body has betrayed her.
Back
in the garden, I focus fiercely on the red and white roses. They blur as tears
sting my eyes. It occurs to me that my body and I have been estranged for a
decade. I have been banished from the only shelter I ever occupied. But did my
body betray me? Or did a childhood battle become a full-blown war?
My mind drifts back a few days. I am taking a
dance class in a dimly lit exercise studio. Dirt from the wood floor grinds
into my feet. Hot spots burn my toes where blisters are forming. Still, I
dance, twist and turn with three other women in the class. The teacher is slim
and young, with a blond ponytail and a small tattoo of a rose on her right
shoulder. She wears black stretch pants and a tiny tank top. Noticing the top,
I feel ashamed and embarrassed. Beneath the embarrassment is anger I stuff
down. My chest is too large for tiny tank tops, and I must be careful to wear
shirts that hide scars. I glance into the mirror and wait for the voice that I
know will soon enter my head. It happens when my right arm moves up. My
shoulders and arms are too thick, it says. My legs are too large. I glance at
the legs of the woman beside me. She is thin and pretty and sleek, and I wish
that I looked like her.
In the
garden, I stare at my hands. They are red, the skin dry. I lift them and hold
them up to the sky.
I am here, yet somewhere else, not now, someday.
The garden is knotty and tangled and old, but I understand that it was once
beautiful. In fact, it is still beautiful. I see disarray but also past glory,
and have affection for them both. I hear music and feel my body dancing. My
hair is long and gray, and it tickles the bare skin on my shoulders. When my
arms move to the side, there is a twinge of pain. Still, I move with the music.
My legs bend, and my hips begin to sway. I smile and turn my face to the sun,
then lower my arms and hug my chest. I take a deep breath. I am home.
No one watches the old lady dance, just a cat
who sits on the fence. Or maybe the cat is watching the magpies. They are
quarreling with the squirrels in the leaves above my head, on a cool September
day in Boulder, Colorado, three weeks before my fortieth birthday.
Copyright © 2014 Faye
Rapoport DesPres
Previously published in Connotation
Press: An Online Artifact
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