She has something to say.
We are at her kitchen table, early January. The hullabaloo of back-to-school folders and board games is scattered around us. Children roam, push in. We urge them back like a tide.
She has an idea. Her eyes open so wide I remember for a moment they’re orbs and not almond-shaped as her lids curtain them to appear. She flattens her hand like a racket, leans forward — her long legs are crossed, and the knee on top hits the table’s sharp edge, but she, smooth as a fold loosening, slips her leg down and under her chair, tipping herself into a ramrod sit.
She gavels the table with her palm, decidedly. “I’m doing it,” she says.
She slides her butt back into the carved-cup of the wooden chair, and with the room she has given herself, recrosses her legs. Her arms fold around each other, not in self-protection, but determination.
Again, she says, “I’m doing it.” Head sideways, chin tucked, eyebrows raised.
The idea has now moved from the depths of heart and brain out into the cavernous real-time, nitty-gritty, of the room. The plan has been pulled from the gray matter and presented. Put out there. Spoken. It has been extracted from the mental do-si-do of hush and doubt and laid bare for another person to hear. It’s a naked utterance that’s now real.
We look at each other and silently ponder the thing. We carousel our wine glasses around and around in our fingers. We watch a child hip-hop down the stairs too fast, but already far and away, down into the basement.
Another child prances past carrying a guinea pig — fat and calm and jolly — in a pink flannel shoulder sling. An older boy rounds the corner, filling the hallway off the kitchen as he hooks his leather jacket into the elbow created by the banister and the post. He has recently learned to saunter and moves with this new liquidity behind the kitchen counter. He rummages in the cabinet.
We try to block all this out. “What do you think?” she asks. And waits. In the momentary silence, we hear two younger boys careen into the kitchen and screech to a halt. The older boy begins to help the two younger ones assemble something, and we hear him say: “Fold it tight, and then shove it deep in your pocket for 20 minutes before you unwrap it to eat.”
He’s showing them how to make pocket tamales.
We avert our eyes and attention from each other, again, and with slight trepidation look to the kitchen. The counter is strewn with the orange tops of ramen bags, scrunched up tortilla chips, foil packets and two beaming boys with all said ingredients, plus hot water, carefully rolled into a ball, and “cooking,” in their baggy pants pockets. Yuck.
The older one squares his high- school big shoulders, and with car keys and a quirky nod is out the door for the evening. “Be good!” she says knowing full well he knows what she means. “I am!” He flips the answer back with the carried grace of a charming almost- man who knows full well the impact his twinkle-eye has on his mother.
The kitchen clears of patter-patter, and finally talk ensues.
The idea is massaged like bread, pushed and pulled back again. Spread out, scooped up, slapped down, patted. The kids come and go, looking for spoons and root beer. One abandons a half-eaten pocket tamale and sits, for a while, on a stool dipping hard-boiled egg into soy sauce.
The screen is left open, and she rises to close it, then slides the heavy glass window tight and shut. The cold leaks in from outside. The winter is still to come. She has to buy stamps to mail bills, refill all the soap containers, sort through her desk until she finds what is lost and what is just in need of straightening.
The two women look at each other. One with her hand on the handle of the heavy glass door and, across the room, the other at the table leaning over the abandoned pocket tamale that smells to high heaven, a stink that does not go well with the wine.
“You’re going to do it,” says one woman.
“I’m doing it,” the other answers.
Say it. Sometimes that’s Step 1.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
