Ruth I.

And then she asked me to never call her again. She pleaded. And I thought of her bloody knees, and her ragged fingernails on my skin, and how could I leave when she was so obviously begging me not to?

It's like the tab on a blue plastic pen cap that holds the pen to someone's shirt pocket -- the tab that you find yourself bending back and forth as you stare at a computer monitor, waiting for the sign-on screen, figiting about what you will have for dinner, and whom you would rather have it with, and where the money will come from; back and forth on the muni bus as a man and woman argue about whether or not he meant to brush that blonde's thigh as he got on, and you worry whether or not you should get off the bus early; back and forth over that overstuffed pillow you hug on the living room couch while you wait for the red-head's lips to stop moving so you can figure out what she's trying to say.

"There are ways of turning things over in the world," I tell her. "Ways of seeing underneath, but all you want to do is watch T.V." She says I'm crazy again, and that without her I'd never make it to work, much less the next millennium. And she's right this time because I leave without my keys or wallet or even some spare change and have to come back and pound on the door and scream, "Give me back my shit, you fucking bitch!" And she says that at least on T.V. they don't use language like that. It isn't until I hide her keys in the clothes hamper and her wallet in the kitchen sink under some dirty dishes that the police come. "I don't know anything," I lie. "I was just leaving." But in the bedroom, it's my ravaged knees and kisses and tears because she could have had them search my room and take me down, but didn't.

So we were parked at the train station, and of course it was raining, and she told me something had broken inside her, she knew it for sure this time, and if I got out of the car she wouldn't come, wouldn't care, wouldn't stop me. And so why stay? Just because her grandmother made her wear lederhosen to public school in San Francisco and eat hunks of German meat out of recycled plastic Wonderbread bags? Just because she collected cows and bears and cried if you told her that bit of rags called Tibbie was really a rabbit and not a dog? And just because she married an English fag to be with her English lover, and lived on a kibbutz, and took a felucca down the Nile, and let her parents buy her a condo to hold her down for awhile?

And sometimes you don't just bend the tab, ("If you get out," she says, "I won't love you") but twist it in circles so the bent part becomes white, ("I can't do this with holes in my hands") the last strands holding a loose tooth ("Don't make me eat it alone") And instead of just biting it off ("It's further than anyone knew"), you count how many more times you can bend it.

ãElizabeth Terry
8/9/93