eyedreamism_viii magicforest part i I wake up tangled in Ethan. From this angle and without my glasses, all of the tiny hairs and pores are gone. What I see are strips of colour, curved and straight lines, light and shadow, smoothing out his body into the folds that feel so familiar to me I know them in this blindness. I resist the urge to get out my acrylics and a canvas and capture him right there. From where I am I can’t see his back; he is facing me. I gently ease myself up and I feel his right hand drop from the slope in my side to the carpet. I peer over him, looking for invading armies over his mountain pass. Ethan has a lovely back. At night he naturally curls into the fetal position and so his back is always arched with his spine pressing against his skin. Ethan has the smoothest back of any man I have known. I have two sketches and one painting of his back, but he doesn’t know this. I kiss his shoulder and he opens his eyes. It simply blows my mind the way that Ethan can wake up so effortlessly. He reaches out and traces a finger along the carpet-pattern in my skin, wide-eyed and hopeful. I give him a look of strict purpose. “No?” he asks, surprised. “Then why are you up so early?” I roll my eyes. Le Café Rêveur is busy. Filled with college girls, I do not recognize it’s blue tones in the blur of beige-dressed leather-coated people. Ethan and I are misplaced—we are too educated, we are older, we are in love. The inhabitants of the café today are long-straight-haired and cross one leg over the other and their elbows don’t get in the way. They are demure and saccharine while being involved and socially conscious, girls who want motherhood without soccer practices, girls who want intellectual men without that unpleasant side effect of politeness. Their revolution quotes Sartre but flirts with Nietzsche, and I don’t understand any of it, not because the concept is below my standards, but because I’ve never studied what they have and I don’t know what it means to quote Sartre but flirt with Nietzsche. I am just an artist and not an intellectual; my altar carries very different gods. I look around for who I consider to be the real patrons of the café—the neatly scrubbed man in the grey overcoat who leaves pink roses for a mysterious tawny French girl, the black grinning man who comes with his Spanish wife and always puts his arms around her, he can’t help himself, as she pushes his hands away, smiling, loving it. The young dark-haired adolescent boy with a soft navy blue corduroy backpack who never buys anything, but sits in a booth by the front window and stares out of a face hollowed by a horrible grief, the bald middle-aged man who builds little towers out of the stirsticks everywhere, making the rest of us careful to not knock them down, the young just-barely-pubescent girl who we all know is being forced to eat by her father so she buys a small tea every day and sips it from a spoon, facing away from the window’s reflection, writing into her cloth-covered journal, sometimes nibbling at the edge of a cookie. They all come for the soothing blue, the soft worn places to curl up in, the ambience of the silver clinking inside the cup and the smell of steam and the docile murmur of whispers and pages turning. Besides this pot pourri of eccentrics, pariahs, misfits, loners, and lovers that we call the regulars, there are the drifters, coming in at odd hours from travels both literal and metaphorical, drawn to this sanctuary, like pale flowers which fade away the next day into the grass. But I don’t find any dreamers at all in the café at this hour; if they are there, they are blending into the shadows. I do not see them. Just these girls who bring mouth to cup instead of cup to mouth. Over their honeyed buzz, I order us both hot chocolate, mine with whipped cream and cocoa dust, his plain. I set my purple angora hat on my knees girlishly and look away. “My mother is coming to meet us.” With that I take a gulp of just-delivered hot chocolate and get whipped cream on my face. I put my head down ashamedly. Ethan beams at me—he has long been curious of the femme fatale who ringleads the Feather dynasty—and starts to chatter his approval. I let him ramble on appreciatively as I try to remember his family. It has been months since I met them. I remember a dim dining room, wooden plates, a mother, father, and Ethan’s sister. They all seemed tired and hardworking and faintly resonant of the Amish. They emanated this old-fashioned goodness that comes with trials. Solemn, faithful, quiet, reserved, peaceful. Simple, no excess. Straight-up, diligent, honest people. In other words, everything my family is not. My family is outwardly decent and respectable, but inwardly soaked in carbonated dysfunction; when shaken, we explode. Ethan is looking at me strangely now. Has he read my mind? Have his fawn-like eyes decanted into my soul and stripped me away, leaving concrete boxes filled with secrets and embarrassments? Will he know that I descend from no glamour, but simply a good dosage of hypocrisy and scandal that never washed out of the gene pool? He bends closer, and closer, and closer, as my heart is sucked into the black hole. Then he promptly sticks out his tongue and swipes a slowly dissolving globule of whipped cream from my nose. 040206 ... magicforest part ii Ethan’s isolation from my mother was one part my resolve and one part happy coincidence. When he’d met Ian, my younger brother, my mother was out at some sort of luxury / vacation / retreat / boat cruise thing for rich, empty people. Which is to say, she did bring my father, but he spent the time gazing in a melancholy way out of the portholes at the stars over the water while my mother limboed on the deck with her purposely-chosen meeker girlfriends (aren’t I outrageous? aren’t I so liberated jumping around with these young Cuban men, whoa Mrs. Feather, you some crazy lady! Okay, you maybe want to sit now? No? Okay, we limbo more! and this twenty-year-old blood running through my veins?). I had been constantly worried that when Ethan met my mother, he would think back over all of my paintings and realize that what I had labelled as imagination-spurred fancies lampooning modern society were simply images I had of my mother during her everyday life, from back when I was younger and naïve and still thought by a ridiculous logic that painting would get the picture out of my head forever, rather than permanently etching it there. But even though I wasn’t on the cruise, I know that my mother limboed and my father maybe cried and that she wore that white halter which plunges low, even low for a woman who’s breasts are already sagging. I know because my mother documents her escapades in great detail and often sends photographs to me mid-trip, adorned with quotations like “Here I am sipping tequila with the cabana boy—what do you think of you shy old mom now?” and little winking smiley faces. Ethan looks at me again, cautiously smiling at my paralysis. His tongue recedes into his warm mouth. He dabs a napkin neatly to his lips. “Do you love your mother, Sid?” I can hear the sound of his voice edged with incredulity, as though he had asked something rhetorical, unable to fathom how a child couldn’t worship her mother, but this is the man who confessed that he had learned to iron so well because his mother sent him off with an old iron to university, knowing he had always been reassured by the smell of steam as he ironed her dresses when he was small. Ethan is not archetypal of typical mother-child relationships. I gulp down more hot chocolate—it is good—and can’t look at Ethan, but gaze inobtrusively around the café at the slowly dispersing college girls. “It’s not that I don’t love my mother,” I say, and explain hastily about the cruise photographs. “It’s that I never thought she was my ‘shy old mom’, and she does this constantly, taking these perceptions and insecurities she has of herself and projecting them onto other people, and then she goes out and smashes them and then comes back triumphantly, showing us how she proved us wrong with photo evidence. If I told her it looked like a grand, wild time for her, she’d be sending me next pictures from the Louvre with a caption like ‘Thought I was just a ditzy exhibitionist, huh? Well here I am next to the breathtaking Mona Lisa, exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark. Wow exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark.” “Does she actually use that many exclamation marks?” “Yes. And always in sets of three. And sometimes she interchanges the middle exclamation mark for a question mark. Like, ‘Isn’t this just fantastic exclamation mark question mark exclamation mark…” I trail off. Ethan is grinning, thinking it’s cute. Well, he thinks something is cute. I can’t tell if it’s her punctuation, or my exasperation with it. I draw my breath. “Also she eats weird.” “Sidney!” “She does. She eats really, really, annoyingly. There is something about the way she eats—I just want to impale her at the dinner table. She makes everything seem crunchy somehow, like it’s just so very nutritious that she’s savouring every bite by chewing it vigorously. I don’t know. When I was little I thought it made the food seem more appetizing, but now it just annoys me. And instead of segregating her food she mixes two different dishes and eats them in the same forkful. Like, peas with potatoes.” Ethan looks at me with mock horror but I know he eats the way I do, the peas first, the potatoes second, or the potatoes first, the peas second, but not both simultaneously, in the same forkful, and even then the transition from peas to potatoes (or potatoes to peas, I don’t know why I keep naturally putting peas first in the order; I don’t like them) is intermissioned by a swift drink of whatever the beverage is, and since the meal is potatoes and peas (there we are, right order) I think Ethan and I would both choose milk. It seems like a thing for children to drink but it really goes well with the digestion. “Also, she doesn’t really approve of my art, I don’t think. Well, she does, but she keeps talking about local artisans and new aesthetic theories she’s read about in magazines or been told about when she inevitably tells some stranger that her daugher is an up-and-coming, and—” “An up-and-coming what?” he asks. “Just an up-and-coming. Ian and I made that up years ago because that’s what my mother uses as an adjective before any jobs she doesn’t really think are that serious. It’s not that she disapproves, but she thinks that there’s some psychology—rebellion, inability to commit or settle, something like that—that makes a person choose an up-and-coming job. Writers, painters, musicians, you know…” “Up-and-coming.” “Right. So she gets fed all of these ideas about art from other people and then just regurgitates them to me, expecting me to be stunned by her sudden accumulation of knowledge or something. It’s all secondhand.” “Most knowledge is, these days.” “Well, of course, not a lot of people think of new things, probably, but at least they’ll come up with some beliefs themselves, from their own inner exploration, before they find out that someone else thought of it first, and that it was probably a Greek or a Roman.” “Or a German. That’s what happened to me with bratwursts—do you remember, Sid? So, unoriginal ideas from original thinking?” “Exactly.” “So is there anything else I should know about your mother before she shows up? I’ve got a good grip on the fractures in her psyche, now, but I’m not up to par with what is appropriate and what isn’t during café table conversation.” I love it when his eyes glitter. “When I was born nobody handed me a cheatsheet with what to say or not say around my mother, and you don’t get one either. Even my father doesn’t know, actually. A new thing insults her everyday.” “She’s temperamental?” “No, it’s just that she reads both a conservative newspaper and a liberal newspaper so she can’t decide on what is politically correct.” “I didn’t think she’d be the type to read newspapers?” “I have my mother’s brain and my father’s soul, Ethan.” “I gasp! Does the woman admit that she was manufactured from a gene tornado like the rest of us degenerates? That Sidney Feather isn’t…” “Au naturel.” “Aren’t there laws against going around like that?” “Bawdy gent!” “Republican lass!” “Post-modern sludge-worm!” “Elizabethan whore!” Ethan shouts. Our laughter is intoxicating and overpowering. “Goodness! I hope that wasn’t in reference to me, monsieur,” says a rich soprano voice to the left of us, and my mother has arrived. hates it when she loses her italics 040206 ... magicforest part iii is in the making. 040206 ... once again O... it's beautiful, and real and right. The cafe reminds me strangely of blather. I can almost see blatherskites in the regulars at the cafe. 040206 ... magicforest The cafe IS blather. For me, anyway. I actually have a very vivid image of exactly what the cafe looks like--set-up, tables, chairs, etc, but I don't want to ruin it for everyone because it's so different to each person, I think...thank you once_again. 040206 ... . marked 040207 ... magicforest I can't believe somebody marked me. 040207 ... smurfus rex can I have a LoveSac in one of the corners? and if her last name really is Feather, when do we find out Ethan's? "Sidney Feather..." rolls very nicely out of my mouth... anticipates part iii 040207 ... whitechocolatewalrus heh, post-modern sludge-worm! i want to live in the blather cafe. 040207 ... marked . 040208 ... magicforest part iii The first thing about Sidney’s mother that I noticed was that she looked a little like those robust women one sees on the television with the artificial plastic faces and the amplified yellow hair that goes around their faces like a bowl, only she had Sidney’s dark curls and piquant eyes—but while Sidney’s eyes glow slightly, her mother’s were rimmed with thickly painted makeup. (I should note: I’ve seen Sid put mascara on a ten-year-old girl during a bumpy car ride without flinching but she never wears it herself.) “I am so sorry,” I said, blushing. “That wasn’t to you at all.” I kissed her hand, which smelled like generic hand lotion and felt leathery. Her eyebrows went up and she smiled. “Un gentleman! Est-il trés bien élevé toujours, Sidney?” “Yes,” Sidney said nondescriptly. “He is.” She pulled herself a chair and sank into it, shook her coat off and looked happily at me. “So you’re the famous Ethan.” She waited as there was an awkward pause, which she then filled with outrageous laughter. I gave her what I hoped was an easy grin. She rested her head on her hand, and stared at me. “You know, I never knew that real people were named Ethan. I thought the name Ethan was reserved for celebrities, you know, or people in soap operas. Do you watch soap operas?” “Not really.” I noticed she wore some large brass jewelry and it clanked a little. “Well, do you watch television? Sidney was always the worst for watching television. All she’d watch were movies, you know. I know I simply couldn’t survive without some television. It just spaces me out! I could sit there for hours. But you know, then I’d never get up—and you’d see me old and fat tottering somewhere, instead of up and about and vibrant, excited about life and living life!” “I watch documentaries sometimes,” I admitted, “And the news.” I thought I detected the traces of a smile in Sidney’s unemotional face. “Oh, the news. Why don’t they show something interesting for once? We spend too much time with the stock market and car accidents, you know. This is a great city, a truly great and animated city, and we spend it in paranoid lethargy, did you know that? We don’t get up or we’ll catch cancer or attract rapists. It’s silly, isn’t it?” “It sure can be.” “I mean, is there any city as newly born as this city? People flee their country lives to thrive here, this is modern geography!” She went on and on about the city’s unique flavour. I admit, I think this city has the typical breakdown—the tall shining silver skyscrapers with their powersuited synergy-driven traders, the streets with their esoteric homeless persons, abstrusely genius cab drivers, assorted pedestrians and faceless drivers of traffic, the numerous delicatessens, sandwich shops, and other eateries with their smiling Jews or Poles or Italians or combinations, the hole-in-the-wall-bistro-restaurant-sports-bar membrane with its engaged or wedlocked twentysomethings—oh, it’s Joe, with his fiance Cindy! she’s a great girl—the quiet residential section with apartments and townhouses crammed together and growing vines of twisted wrought iron around old red and brown brick—snuggled up against the university—and the worse sections, dirtier sections with a million spicy noodles and curry pastes and sticky rice take-outs, (all of whom’s menus Sidney considers proverbial, she knows them so well) and ghastly tiny doubtful convenience stores, and sad pubs and cheap old bars, and pounding dancing ecstatic clubs, street cars and buses and pollution and ads and billboards and pavement everywhere, and the subway sliding under the whole city, coasting on the tectonic plates, taking the swaying passengers for a ride. “Oh, but the suburbs are so nice,” said Sidney mildly, interrupting her mother. I gawped. Sidney is not a suburban girl—it’s too common, and Sidney has the annoying quality to denounce anything common—but besides that, Sidney loves to eat out, and in the suburbs she’d have to travel significantly longer to get to her Thai. (During one squabble when I wanted to teach Sidney how to budget wisely—without a serious intervention she would have been in the hole come fall—we switched budgets for a month, and half-way through I actually caught her wandering innocently into the bank to make an emergency withdrawal, and then I stalked her right to her favourite tampoori vendor before jumping behind her and shouting “Ahah!” and scaring her half to death.) No, Sidney could not survive in the suburbs. “Oh, well, I know what you’re saying, believe me,” her mother said, taking Sidney’s hand and looking at her imploringly. “I mean, you spend too much time here and the suburbs are such a fresh breath of air. You can breathe there, and if you go to the outskirts and the country you see it even more. Nothing but wall to wall horizons, or no walls, actually, that’s something about the country—they have no walls.” “It must be hard for them to build their houses,” Sidney interjected nonchalantly. I realized with great bemusement that she was purposely provoking her mother. I wondered what on earth Sidney felt she had to prove. “I don’t follow you. I have always found country people more enduring, if anything—and all of the educated people come to the city, so you can only assume that the country folk would be skilled in trades. House-building is probably cheaper there too, Sid, dear, you might actually consider moving there if things…well, work out.” She smiled in a comely way to me. “I hope they do, Mrs. Feather.” I said, just as cunningly. “Mrs. Feather! My, I don’t need that.” she said, laughing, but didn’t correct me. “So you’re a schoolteacher?” “Yes. I teach high school students English.” “We share a profession then! I’m sure Sidney has neglected to tell you that I’m a university professor.” “A professor of interior decoration.” Sidney said pointedly. “Well, it’s the most rewarding thing you can do with your life, you know.” “Assuming you’re a good teacher,” said Sidney. Her mother ignored this. “I mean, I have so many students who tell me I’ve changed their life in these dramatic ways, these really powerful ways—” “Assuming they’re good ways.” said Sidney. “—it’s such an honour, isn’t it Ethan?” “I suppose so. Spreading knowledge is an honourable devotion.” “Oh, well, I’m not sure about the word devotion. I don’t think I could donate my life to anything.” “The country club,” Sidney murmured. “I mean, donating money is one thing. But donating a life to a cause? Even teaching?” She clicked her tongue in disapproval. “A sad existence, I’d think.” “I think it depends on your perspective on life,” I said, growing a little annoyed with Sidney, who clearly wasn’t making any attempt at pleasantries whatsoever. “If you see it as something which you most devote in order to live honourably.” “And do you believe that?” I thought. “Yes, I do. Devotion doesn’t equate to a personal sacrifice of happiness.” “Touché!” she exclaimed. “Un surendettement.” Sidney whispered. I realized that by some obscure Sidney logic, she was trying to prove to me that she wasn’t like her mother, that she knew that you can’t build a house without walls. A cell phone rang, an alien noise in the café. Sidney’s mother rolled her eyes, concealing a secret pride, I suspected, and she answered it tartly. I quietly reached under the table and took Sidney’s small hand in mine. She resisted, tried to pull away, but my grip was strong. Finally she consented and I felt her fingers twine with mine. In that moment we were so covalently together that an image flashed through my mind—a big house in the country, two little girls running through the yard, a dog, Sidney wearing something white and billowing and light, hanging laundry on the line, me lying on the grass reading something and watching her, the sun on the pages, as she senses my eyes and turns around, laughing, begging me to go to town with her tonight so we can have authentic Indian—bring the children too, they love it like she does, her tamarinds and cumin were passed through the placenta, although maybe the older one can budget a little better, she got that from her daddy. It flashed away. Sidney disconnected her hand. Her mother was getting up, gaily, jovial. “…and I can’t believe the woman’s audacity. But this is price of being a social butterfly, you know? I admit I just love the girl—she’s ridiculous but in a good way. Outrageous! Well, Ethan, it was just a delight to meet you.” “It was great to meet you too. I hope to see you again.” She winked at me and gave Sidney a quick embrace. “I’m off!” she waved. Sidney and I slowly sat back down and looked at eachother. She smiled at me sort of shyly. I know that look of hers. It means she’s making pictures in her head, pictures she’ll release into her paint later, once I’ve fallen asleep, so that when we wake up she smells of watercolours. I knew it; she sensed the change I had felt just as strongly, a new chesspiece sitting there, foreign to the board, that had never been there before, letting us decide what to do with it. We paid what we owed to the café and went out into the city, the sunrise lighting everything up in a yellow-orange, setting the mood for another day. i got marked AGAIN?! 040208 ... marked I like the eyedreamisms. . 040623 ... u24 *sigh* 040628 ... magicforest why the sigh? 040629 ... magicforest oh--smurfus rex--not to spoil the surprise--but in case I didn't post it in a previous eyedreamism: Sidney Feather Ethan Gray 040629 ... u24 oh, lot's of reasons. the obvious reason is that this is the last one but also, the 'isms' inspire a kind of sadness in me, much like when I read iain banks, or even sophies world. A kind of sad longing, reflection. it's a nice mood. a glad sadness. almost the kind of mood you feel when you've spent hours laying in the park at summer time, and you know it's time to get up and leave, but your body feels so comfortable you just can't do anything except sigh and roll slowly over, feeling the cooling evening sun beat on the side of your face, and the wind gently caressing your hair, and the prickle of grass against your cheek. yah. :-) 040630 ... magicforest This is not the last one. I just accidentally wrote the true final eyedreamism before I had actually written up to it, so now I'm going backwards. I couldn't leave the eyedreamisms without concluding the first one. it would be like abandoning my own child. thank you, u24 040630 what's it to you? who go blather from