Lea Soranno
Bare Knees
Her thoughts were tangled, in and out of one another, making it difficult to separate them into anything coherent. They were tangled like the knots she used to get in her hair as a child from lying on the ground, in the dirt and leaves, breathing in the sky. She liked to watch the clouds roll past and imagine that someone, in California or China or some other distant place, would be seeing those same clouds soon. Her mother called the tangles in her hair “birds nests,” sometimes “rats nests,” when they were particularly bad. She would have to comb the knots out with an alcohol-perfumed spray in a bottle. While her mother combed she would stare at the blond haired girl on the label of the bottle. The girl was smiling and holding a teddy bear. The spray was designed for kids and advertised the slogan, “no more tears.” The girl on the bottle was clearly not crying, and she herself would try her hardest to be just like the girl on the label, but most of the time tears would roll out, and when they did she stared at the label girl with a hate she couldn’t understand. Sometimes her mother would get out the scissors and cut the knots out, leaving a blunt empty space at the back of her head. She would pick up these tangles and take apart the knots, sticks, and leaves.
The tangles that were now inside her head could not be picked through in the same way. The thoughts
tangling her mind were short and spastic. Millions of them were flooding though the rivers of tissue and clogging
her sleep. She would wake up in the mornings with the tangles of her dreams caught up in her conscious mind.
She
wanted to crawl inside her own head and flick away the unnecessary thoughts with her fingernails and then scrub
the walls of her head until they were like new. She would wake up feeling like something had been taken from her,
but she didn’t know what, just that something was gone. She wouldn’t always remember the dreams she had had
in the night, but they left behind a feeling. She hated talking about her dreams because she didn’t want to know
what people would decide they meant. In one dream she had been looking at a photograph of a restaurant.
A man and woman approached her and looked over her shoulder at the photo. “Oh,” the man said. “We know
that restaurant.” “The vegetables are never good, the fruit is mealy, people only go for the soup,” the woman said.
She was then in the restaurant. She could see the large tin soup pots, large like bathtubs, filled and bubbling.
The cook came out and filled the pots with noodles that were thick like rope. He started to twist the noodles
into knots and loops. He was making a noodle noose, and everyday he contemplated using the noose to
hang himself, and everyday he decided to wait. Her head began to hurt. She was falling. She wanted to
yell, “I’m leaving my body now,” but she couldn’t. Finally the words left her mouth and she woke up to hear herself speaking out loud. She remembered that dream because it woke up with her. A part of her was still in the restaurant, the part that jumped when someone snuck up behind her, the part that hyperventilated when she was in an elevator. The dream was a fog in her room pushing her to the bed in a prickly sweat. She thought about the commercials for bad breath where green smoke comes out of a person’s mouth to show just how bad the breath is. Her dreams were like that green smoke.
She had started taking classes at an extension school, and working part time at a fabric store. She had been out of school for several years now, but had decided to get her degree. There wasn’t much time between work and class so she mapped out her schedule based on the bus. If she left work at 3:00 she could get on the 3:14 bus and make it to class by 3:45. She wondered if her tangled thoughts had something to do with having to get from one place to another so frequently that her mind was often racing. This made the time at work or school rather difficult because she couldn’t slow her mind down to grasp information the way she would have liked. She was taking classes in literature and grammar, because she thought she would become a grade school teacher or perhaps a librarian. She had a fondness for the thick crayons and manila paper found in classrooms. She also liked the tiny pencils and note cards with random holes or numbers stamped into them, found at the information desk at the library. She liked that she knew exactly how these items made her feel, a sort of nostalgia, and these pencils and papers never changed, or at least not in her lifetime. She applied for the job at the fabric store, Craft Town USA, because it was close to her house and close enough to school. She worked with old ladies that spent their breaks reading romance novels and eating bland sandwiches. She talked about school and the bus and could complain as much as she wanted without wondering if she seemed annoying because the old ladies also complained a lot. She considered the old ladies a probable part of her future in either profession she eventually chose.
She ran to the bus. She hadn’t left work until 3:07 because she had more fabric than usual to put away.
The store was having a sale on Christmas prints, and holiday quilters were buying out the store. She longed for
a world where the difference between 3:00 and 3:07 wasn’t so grand. She had been measuring out time into
tiny vials, and shoving them into her pockets. They clanged and banged about with her keys and change. Sometimes they would break open and the time would float away. Other times they would fall out or be misplaced, and either way the time was lost forever.
She had been taking this bus route long enough to recognize the other regulars. She would say hello to the day bus driver and avoid eye contact with the angry night driver. She knew that the drivers gave a person about five seconds to get their change into the slot before they got upset. She thought about her money as potential bus fare. She didn’t spend dimes at stores anymore, because she needed two dimes to pay the $1.20 fare. If she paid with a quarter she would be wasting 5 cents on every ride and after twenty rides she would have wasted a dollar.
Her Walkman was necessary for riding the bus. People don’t start conversations with other people who are wearing headphones. Today she had left her Walkman at home. She thought it was in her bag when she left home, but she had been wrong. She searched through her bag hoping to find something that could take the place. She considered wrapping a scarf around her head, but realized that that would be uncomfortable and more importantly wouldn’t prevent someone from talking to her.
When the bus pulled into the station, she had her dollar and two dimes ready in her clenched fist. The doors opened and she climbed the stairs and expertly put her money into the slot. She took a quick surveillance of the other people already seated. There was an open seat close to the front of the bus that she chose to sit in. She looked at the faces of the other people again now that she was seated and saw one man that she recognized. He was someone that lived near her. She had seen him around before, but had never talked to him. He was about forty and was blind. She had once seen him walking on the sidewalk across the street from her. She wondered if being blind was anything like her method for passing time whenever she was waiting for someone to meet her. She would close her eyes and imagine them walking or driving. She would imagine their starting point. If her mother were meeting her she would imagine her mother leaving the house, walking to the car, getting into the car, starting the car. She would imagine how long it might take to get to the stoplight, to the corner. The imagined mother would always arrive earlier than the real mother. She wondered if blind people ever got to places slower than they thought they should have.
She had once watched the blind man walking down the sidewalk toward a streetlight. She wondered if he
would walk into it. She thought maybe she would offend him, if she called out to him to watch out. She
assumed blind people must just be able to sense things in their path. He ended up walking right into it and she had felt guilty for not doing anything and because she had sort of known that he would walk into it all along.
The bus came to the next stop and another familiar face got onto the bus, another stranger. She had also seen this man walking around the city by himself. He walked on his tiptoes and wore a trench coat and knee socks. She couldn’t tell if he had anything on under the coat because it only went to his knees, which were bare. He looked like a flasher, but as far as she knew, he hadn’t ever flashed anyone. He sat down next to the blind man and grabbed the blind man’s pole. He must have thought it was the pole of the bus. The blind man flinched and pulled his pole away.
There was something intriguing in the flasher's character. He should have been capable of recognizing that the pole he had grabbed wasn’t part of the bus. He wasn’t blind. He was removed in some other way. The blind man couldn’t see but was probably more aware of his surroundings than the flasher was. The flasher was somewhere else, as though his trench coat and dusty winter hat enclosed him like a magical cloak in which everyone else became invisible. She stared at his vacant face and saw in it whatever it was that she wasn’t. He was the opposite of her and her overly aware consciousness. She felt removed and linked to everything and everyone around her. She would stare at people until they noticed and then continue to think about them while looking away. She thought she knew everything about these two strangers, that they were somehow a type that could be recognized.
Sometimes these feelings and thoughts took on an irrelevant grandness. It was like a repeated memory of something she had never experienced, someone else’s déjà vu. An aching sadness came over her. She never got to know what these people were really like, and just assumed that whatever she thought was the truth. She wasn’t like the detested conversation starters; she was a face studier. She took these faces in until she could decide who they were or why they existed. The worst part was that she only let them become something to her, so that she could understand herself better. They were characters that existed for playing out parts inside her head, and she wondered if that made her more removed than either the blind man or the flasher.
It was the summer and she had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t let the season go by without going to the beach. The beach, or perhaps more specifically the ocean, knew something about her. It told her what kind of person she would become.
When she was just a child, she had gone to the beach with her best friend and the friend’s mother. They had lived in the same apartment building, the one her family had moved into in anticipation of her birth. The families had stayed friends even after her family had moved. The mothers took turns trading the children. Now they were at the beach even though it was February. She didn’t know that February meant that she wasn’t supposed to swim. She had worn her bathing suit under her clothes and stripped them off and ran to the water just like any other trip to the ocean. She felt alone. She always felt alone at the beach, but this was the kind of alone one feels when they are being watched. She dove under the waves and they stung her body, but she didn’t realize why until she was older and finally listened to the words in that story, “it was February and she swam anyway. It must have been twenty degrees that day, who knows how cold the water was.” She was talented at removing herself from the curiosity of physical pain. She won contests at sleepover parties for standing under the cold shower the longest, for who could touch the heated metal pan. It was the emotional pain that made her think she was dying.
She was at the ocean, with the same friend and friend’s mother, but now she was a young adult, yet always felt like a child on family outings. It was early in the summer and she was already at the beach. She was glad that she would make it there at least once that year, because last year she hadn’t managed to go at all. The roads to the ocean were lined with fields and marshes and broken down airplanes. They stopped along these roads to study the planes, or climb the watchtower that looked out over the cattails and wildflowers. When they got to the beach she laid out her towel, removed her clothing down to her bathing suit and ran into the water. She wanted to be inside of it, to feel the coolness pass and become her own temperature as her arms, legs, and hair mixed with the water. But once she was in, she was only in for a moment. She didn’t like to swim, to struggle with the waves, to be dragged around. She might return to the water later, for another quick dip.
She lay down on her blanket and grabbed at the sand as the sunrays entered her skin, raising her heart rate, while putting her to sleep. She couldn’t fall asleep though. She turned her head from the sun and saw something else lying in the sand some ten feet away. It wasn’t alive, at least not now. She got up to look closer. No one seemed to notice the thing, yet they were positioned on the beach as though they were orbiting it, as though it had arranged everyone around it’s rotting form. It was the remains of a giant fish, larger than any fish she had ever seen before. Some of the skin had completely melted away, but the head was still covered. At first she hated the fish, the way it had altered everything, made it all smell a little stronger, but she realized that she had known this fish once, somehow. The fish settled into her mind in the place she kept her memories, so she didn’t know if she really had ever know it before. She started to poke it with a piece of driftwood, and studied the way the bones fit together, at some points merging into the flesh, creating a sort of armor. She wanted to take the fish home with her, but too much of it was fermented by rotting meat. She broke its spine in half and put the head into a plastic bag. Part of her was excited to have the skeleton, but another part was repulsed, not because of its smell, but because of its questionable familiarity. She placed the bag in the trunk of the car, and spent the ride home wondering if she should just throw it away at the next rest stop.
She remembered when she was a child and she visited her grandmother in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her grandmother lived in a cul-de-sac with lots of identical duplexes. Her grandmother would watch her from the doorway of the house, as she would run around with the other children. One afternoon her grandmother had taken her to the natural history museum. They saw a skeleton from a whale that had been suspended from the ceiling. There was a button on the wall, and when she pushed it, the sounds of whales played out over a speaker. She didn’t want to go to the other exhibits, she just wanted to stare at that giant skeleton and press the button over and over.
This memory was the part of her that loved the fish head, but there was the part of her that hated it too. That part made her wonder if she had forced the fish skeleton to match up with one of her memories because what she was actually feeling was guilt for tampering with something natural that was only meant to be tampered with by other natural things like salt and sand and flies and time, and if in turn she had been defined as something unnatural.
She felt this now, on the bus, as she was trying hard to place this feeling of reliving a memory. She had intertwined the lives of the strangers into her own. She knew what was needed for them. She wanted to go to the blind man and whisper in his ear, “Don’t worry. No one is trying to hurt you. The man who grabbed your pole is old and not all there in his head. He has mistaken your pole for a part of the bus.”
The blind man now looked worried. The flasher had tried to grab his pole again, and now the blind man was checking his pockets to make sure he still had all his belongings. The flasher was staring out at nothing.
She was getting off at the next stop and started for the door, in anticipation. The driver announced the stop by
the two interesting roads at the stoplight up ahead. The blind man started to stand. He would be getting off the
bus too. The bus pulled into the stop and she was closer to the door, so got off first. The door let out to a bench
and she knew that the blind man wouldn’t be expecting this obstacle. She turned to him and said, “There is a bench
in front of you.” He took her arm and she led him around the bench. “Thank you,” he said. His hand was rubbing her
arm. “The man on the bus wasn’t trying to harm you,” she said. “Thank you,” he said and his hand went lower on
her arm. “He was old and didn’t know what he was doing.” she said. “Thank you,” he said again. His hand touched
her stomach. “He thought your pole was part of the bus,” she said. “Thank you,” he said for the last time. His hand
darted down her pants. She muttered as she backed away from him and his hand and she walked away. She
crossed the street toward the school and began to laugh.
©2008 by Lea Soranno
