Her Name was Never Satified
A Tale Based on 'Hunger'‘That’s not enough,’ she started before dinner.
She said this without the big doe eyes. Without the pouting lips like a child’s, or the dumb broad-type with the big wholesome breasts and baby voice. If only it had anything to do with her being a woman—or even child-like.
Whatever she wanted, she would get.
She was, nonetheless, striking. The kind of beauty any man must stop to admire, as one should appreciate a Botticelli with appropriate reverence. Her laudable dark hair and eyes, no matter whether he preferred blonds or redheads, blue, green, or hazel eyes. The color skin that was neither dark, nor olive, nor pale.
She fit in perfectly, just as easy as her favorite pair of tan leather gloves slipped onto her fingers. I relished in her presence, watching her spectators, the indiscreet ones, not remembering their manners. Practically staring. Especially other women who noticed her (them I didn’t mind so much). The kind of woman who’d maybe forget, for just one moment, to pick up Jimmy from Little League practice, the husband’s dry-cleaning that he absolutely needs, to cook pot roast instead of Wednesday’s usual green bean casserole because guests are expected.
Just from a glance.
Something about her, as always, that seeped into the tongue-tips of the waiters and diners, even the head chef and his cook-assistants, in the restaurant where she and I met once a week.
At a place called Chez Panni's.
‘Let me keep a piece for longer,’ she said. ‘One or two fingers, I’m sure you won’t miss.’
And I wanted to pull a meat cleaver, the size of a Swiss Army knife, from my inside breast pocket, and set my hand to the butter plate. It was the right size to make up a scaffold, sturdy enough to clip a digit or two. I wanted to give her anything she asked.
‘Better yet,’ she continued, touching my wrist lightly, out of concern, and added, ‘From both hands.’
I hesitated a moment—I didn’t own a meat cleaver the size of a Swiss Army knife. The middle of my chest tightened because I was hungry; it seemed better that we eat first. The house special was seared Cornish hen with an apricot glaze I wanted to try. After a good meal, she and I could discuss perspective limbs.
‘It’s not that I’m asking for a leg,’ after the moment passed.
Well, that’s true, I thought, feeling palpitations in the tips of my fingers and seeing there was only a long butter knife with tiny serrated teeth. That was her nature, to make comparisons necessary for a good bargain.
I reached for the butter knife and worked on my right. Middle and ring finger, like she asked. Then the left. She wrapped them gingerly in the cloth napkin from her dinner placement, and smiled, pleased with herself for making such a neat Origami-style arrangement to put my fingers. I, too, was impressed with her napkin-folding skills.
‘Though a foot would be nice,’ she stated, an afterthought, the Origami napkin disappearing into her purse.
When the waiter arrived, I ordered steak. She wanted steak, too—Well done—No. Not steak—The roast duck and shallots—No, wait—Just better have the salad. Hold the lettuce.
She stared at my new-pronged hands when my steak finally arrived and her salad with no lettuce. I realized I should have started on my foot first, grappling the steak knife clumsily above my ankle. Before almost dropping the severed lump into her lap, sans the oxford loafer I was wearing.
‘I’ll need both feet,’ she quickly decided.
Of course I consented. She set my feet into white to-go boxes, and the boxes into separate doggy bags.
‘Because, soon I have to go,’ was her reason.
I thought it strange, she never had to go soon before. But I never thought to ask, at that time or anytime after, where the hell she was going with my feet and fingers.
‘Just a few trinkets,’ she nonetheless reassured me, smiling again, and caressing the leather handles of her bag.
‘To show how much I love you’ was her finale. The right words she knew would please me.
She never even touched her salad.---
Hunger
That’s not enough.
To keep the hunger at bay—
Let me keep a piece, for longer.
One or two fingers
One or two fingers
I’m sure you won’t miss.
The middle & ring finger.
Better yet—I’ll take
Better yet—I’ll take
Both fingers. From both hands.
It’s not that I’m asking for a leg.
It’s not that I’m asking for a leg.
Though a foot would be nice.
Just above the ankle
I’ll keep your Achilles’ heel—
I’ll keep your Achilles’ heel—
In tact.
Actually,
Actually,
I’ll need both feet.
Because soon I have to go.
Just a few trinkets—
To show how much I love you.---
The Girls
It was a mild day. Summer was coming. We sat underneath a white sun during lunch, in our purposefully made short skirts, blue black and white plaid pleats, and white un-tucked shirts. Some of us ventured so far as kept one or two top buttons unfurled. Not only to be noticed by the boys but to size up each other, whose breasts were biggest or roundest, with the most bounce or loose swaying.
That was the age I found out adults did it, too. The teachers, squinting in the distance, perpetually displeased faces like ostriches, kept a steady watch in the school yard—one foot pointed forward, their weight on the opposite leg and a hand clasped wrist. Doing a double-take at the way we promenaded, in close coordinated pack if we were too bored to sit on benches and watch the older boys play basketball. The teachers would murmur something about God couldn’t help us. Even though we couldn’t help ourselves.
The girl with closely perfect breasts was tall, a sixth-grade Amazon, and ash brown. The same grade as us. She was the only one who wore a Peter Pan collar blouse. Not a pretty face, but her body was good. She wore a pink bra underneath her translucent shirt. Other times white. We all thought she was slutty. The boys noticed her more than was allowed. Which broke our cardinal rule: keep the boys away, at a respectable distance.
She flicked her micro braids in our direction and smiled, Hey you guys, and walked passed us. The girls responded in a chorus line, the zigzag apparatus of an accordion singing, Hiiii.
I looked at her chest and said nothing.
That day I wore my new red KEDS. The girls thought they were cute, and I got after-school detention for a dress code violation. "Brown or black shoes only "was the rule—although I didn’t care. I asked the detention moderator if I could go to the bathroom, just before the two hour mark was supposed to start. The newly tenured fourth grade teacher smiled slightly and gestured with her manicured fingers, in a timid but precise authority.
Sure, just don’t take too long.
I walked down the hallway, between white walls, my rubber feet squeaking against dull black and white checkered tiles. The girls’ bathroom immediately smelled like aged formaldehyde. I was four feet inside when I noticed, in the second stall to the left, two heels protruding below the decrepit wood door. The giggling back and forth in mutual excitement or fear. Anticipation I hadn’t come to know at eleven years old.
The girls I knew talked expertly about their parents or older siblings, the boys whispered the cunts and pussies to each other at their desks behind mine or in the hall. How they thought they knew matters-of-sex.
The shock, gasp! and palpitation I felt.
I stopped and began to turn, stopped and listened some more. My shins hurt from standing still. For less than two minutes. Despite having felt a whole lifetime passing.
I crept into a stall across the way, stepped up on the toilet seat and sat on the steel flusher and leaned forward. Eavesdropping on choked-up miscellaneous ugh’s and mm’s. The nauseated disgust I felt in my throat, back to the time I caught my brother watching a porno, of a man and woman, her extra teased curls and pink lipstick made his penis disappear. I couldn’t help imagining my mother, aunts and grandmother doing the same, sucking on a guy’s thing.
The Amazon girl and a boy, a lot of the girls liked watching him play ball, finally emerged from the stall. Before he left, he swung his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek, whispered something that made her smile then laugh out loud. Before she left, she looked in the bathroom's panoramic mirror, twirled tiny braids around her finger and twisted the tip of her foot awkwardly. She was wearing her pink bra.
I walked home, AWOL from detention, leaving behind my silver book bag, my silver binder with loose-leaf paper and my Lisa Frank folders. I refused to talk to my mother when she asked, What’s wrong?
The next day at school, the girls decided on a cooler approach. We sat underneath a white sun once more during lunch. You know, because you never came back for detention, there won’t be any more bathroom passes for it. I already had a talk with the principal. He announced the new rule over the PA, stating the reason, As a result of persons feeling they’re above the rules. He also gave me Saturday detention. I would have to help clean the bathrooms.
The girls waited for my response, each with a different contemptuous face. I looked back at them. That sickened feeling in my throat hadn’t gone. I wondered if any of them had done it already. If they liked it or if it was all a game of pretend. I decided the Amazon girl was no better than the rest of us.
I decided they could keep waiting.---
About the Girl, Lavender (excerpt)
Her name was Lavender. A strange little girl, ten years old. At first I mistook her for a stray, making a sudden appearance on my front porch; she had the lithe-like abilities of a cat. She stood there, the tiniest thing in the world, watching the other children. Those children who had parents and homes to belong. They all lived in the Millers Road neighborhood, a long stretch of brownstones and brick houses and the best kind of wood paneled shingles that could make a respectable home.
Lavender lived with her older brother Jesua and their grandmother who was sickly. They lived on the coal mining grounds where Jesua worked, in a trailer on lease from the coal mining company. The children’s father left when they were young—he was headed to the bar, be back in a few hours, he said, never to return again. Their mother stayed on until Jesua turned eighteen and started work at the mines like his father before him—she was going to be working late at the diner, and left instructions, Lavender be in bed by eight and Jesua don’t stay up for me.
Never to return thereafter.
Jesua preferred to keep busy. Hard work in the mines occupied him enough during the day, and the prostitutes kept him busy at night. He barely spoke to his sister, except to say, take care, no dinner for me tonight—when her brother actually meant, I’ll be gone for a few weeks.
The man-boy Jesua was the moody, sensitive type. He drank for spite at Connelly’s, where his father used to frequent, and never again ate his favorite fried hamburger with bacon and Swiss, at the diner where his mother used to work and indulge him.
He envied Lavender because she didn’t have to deal with the responsibility.
At twenty-three, Jesua would finally bury his emotions in Lake Okanogee . This I would read about in the local gazette. The remainder of his feelings was found in a three-quarters empty bottle of mint-flavored gin.
It would happen a little ways after what happened to Lavender.
Her brother occasionally returned to the trailer to check in on her. At times he stayed a few days, when one of the working girls he was seeing for a time kicked him out of her apartment for running out of money.
Coming back home, he especially noticed how much taller, skinnier, and older, Lavender had become at ten. And because Jesua was so moody and sensitive, he most decidedly refused to acknowledge his elder, Elsa was the woman’s name, because she too nearly favored his mother.
Their grandmother didn’t speak. She had been dying a slow death for years, much longer than her grandchildren were alive, and decided talking wouldn’t do her much good considering the circumstances.
Lavender was left to take care of the poor soul. She made sure to take the ailing woman to the outhouse and feed her every morning; she put crushed aspirin in some broth to make her grandmother sleep—so Lavender could finally have the day to herself.
The child preferred to traverse about town or stay near the mines, collecting pieces of coal to build miniature houses, she used bent scraps of cardboard for the roofs.
Elsa was left alone; she wouldn’t get fed again or be able to relieve herself until the evening.
Whatever love Jesua had for Lavender, and Lavender for Jesua, and whatever love both children had for their grandmother, they had their own ways of showing it.* * *
Lavender’s favorite place to go was Millers Road.
She thought nothing of the half-a-day’s walk, three miles north to the center of town and then five miles northeast, to get to the best-looking neighborhood.
She enjoyed watching the little boys and girls her age, she had seen them hundreds of times before. Between rain and heat waves and if her grandmother didn’t make a turn for the worse, Lavender was determined to go.
By the five hundred and fifty-sixth time, she decided to reveal herself to them.
To laugh and play was what she desired; Lavender thought it was all children were supposed to do. She knew Tic-Tack-Toe and Blind Man’s Bluff and I Spy; she learned how to laugh and play from the Millers Road children. That much, at least they could give her, but their superficial provisions ended there.
Lavender said to herself, there can’t be much trouble to be fitting in. She wasn’t much good for reading others, that wouldn’t be her gift.* * *
There was an equitable number of girls and boys, three for each sex. They boldly decided on a new, rather vulgar game called Spin the Bottle, the day Lavender wanted to join in. But the children had refused to play with her. Because even the children of Millers Road have limits concerning how clean their playmates were, where they came from, including what kind of clothes the parents of prospective playmates could afford.* * *
The air was thick with black dust surrounding the coal mines. Keeping a daily cleansing routine was more than an unnecessary chore for Lavender, she liked to go as she pleased once her grandmother was fast asleep.
But her face and body was dirtier than she liked, she began to resemble an uprooted potato, and there was nothing left to wear. Both Lavender’s and her grandmother’s clothes needed a proper rinse.
The Girls
It was a mild day. Summer was coming. We sat underneath a white sun during lunch, in our purposefully made short skirts, blue black and white plaid pleats, and white un-tucked shirts. Some of us ventured so far as kept one or two top buttons unfurled. Not only to be noticed by the boys but to size up each other, whose breasts were biggest or roundest, with the most bounce or loose swaying.
That was the age I found out adults did it, too. The teachers, squinting in the distance, perpetually displeased faces like ostriches, kept a steady watch in the school yard—one foot pointed forward, their weight on the opposite leg and a hand clasped wrist. Doing a double-take at the way we promenaded, in close coordinated pack if we were too bored to sit on benches and watch the older boys play basketball. The teachers would murmur something about God couldn’t help us. Even though we couldn’t help ourselves.
The girl with closely perfect breasts was tall, a sixth-grade Amazon, and ash brown. The same grade as us. She was the only one who wore a Peter Pan collar blouse. Not a pretty face, but her body was good. She wore a pink bra underneath her translucent shirt. Other times white. We all thought she was slutty. The boys noticed her more than was allowed. Which broke our cardinal rule: keep the boys away, at a respectable distance.
She flicked her micro braids in our direction and smiled, Hey you guys, and walked passed us. The girls responded in a chorus line, the zigzag apparatus of an accordion singing, Hiiii.
I looked at her chest and said nothing.
That day I wore my new red KEDS. The girls thought they were cute, and I got after-school detention for a dress code violation. "Brown or black shoes only "was the rule—although I didn’t care. I asked the detention moderator if I could go to the bathroom, just before the two hour mark was supposed to start. The newly tenured fourth grade teacher smiled slightly and gestured with her manicured fingers, in a timid but precise authority.
Sure, just don’t take too long.
I walked down the hallway, between white walls, my rubber feet squeaking against dull black and white checkered tiles. The girls’ bathroom immediately smelled like aged formaldehyde. I was four feet inside when I noticed, in the second stall to the left, two heels protruding below the decrepit wood door. The giggling back and forth in mutual excitement or fear. Anticipation I hadn’t come to know at eleven years old.
The girls I knew talked expertly about their parents or older siblings, the boys whispered the cunts and pussies to each other at their desks behind mine or in the hall. How they thought they knew matters-of-sex.
The shock, gasp! and palpitation I felt.
I stopped and began to turn, stopped and listened some more. My shins hurt from standing still. For less than two minutes. Despite having felt a whole lifetime passing.
I crept into a stall across the way, stepped up on the toilet seat and sat on the steel flusher and leaned forward. Eavesdropping on choked-up miscellaneous ugh’s and mm’s. The nauseated disgust I felt in my throat, back to the time I caught my brother watching a porno, of a man and woman, her extra teased curls and pink lipstick made his penis disappear. I couldn’t help imagining my mother, aunts and grandmother doing the same, sucking on a guy’s thing.
The Amazon girl and a boy, a lot of the girls liked watching him play ball, finally emerged from the stall. Before he left, he swung his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek, whispered something that made her smile then laugh out loud. Before she left, she looked in the bathroom's panoramic mirror, twirled tiny braids around her finger and twisted the tip of her foot awkwardly. She was wearing her pink bra.
I walked home, AWOL from detention, leaving behind my silver book bag, my silver binder with loose-leaf paper and my Lisa Frank folders. I refused to talk to my mother when she asked, What’s wrong?
The next day at school, the girls decided on a cooler approach. We sat underneath a white sun once more during lunch. You know, because you never came back for detention, there won’t be any more bathroom passes for it. I already had a talk with the principal. He announced the new rule over the PA, stating the reason, As a result of persons feeling they’re above the rules. He also gave me Saturday detention. I would have to help clean the bathrooms.
The girls waited for my response, each with a different contemptuous face. I looked back at them. That sickened feeling in my throat hadn’t gone. I wondered if any of them had done it already. If they liked it or if it was all a game of pretend. I decided the Amazon girl was no better than the rest of us.
I decided they could keep waiting.---
About the Girl, Lavender (excerpt)
Her name was Lavender. A strange little girl, ten years old. At first I mistook her for a stray, making a sudden appearance on my front porch; she had the lithe-like abilities of a cat. She stood there, the tiniest thing in the world, watching the other children. Those children who had parents and homes to belong. They all lived in the Millers Road neighborhood, a long stretch of brownstones and brick houses and the best kind of wood paneled shingles that could make a respectable home.
Lavender lived with her older brother Jesua and their grandmother who was sickly. They lived on the coal mining grounds where Jesua worked, in a trailer on lease from the coal mining company. The children’s father left when they were young—he was headed to the bar, be back in a few hours, he said, never to return again. Their mother stayed on until Jesua turned eighteen and started work at the mines like his father before him—she was going to be working late at the diner, and left instructions, Lavender be in bed by eight and Jesua don’t stay up for me.
Never to return thereafter.
Jesua preferred to keep busy. Hard work in the mines occupied him enough during the day, and the prostitutes kept him busy at night. He barely spoke to his sister, except to say, take care, no dinner for me tonight—when her brother actually meant, I’ll be gone for a few weeks.
The man-boy Jesua was the moody, sensitive type. He drank for spite at Connelly’s, where his father used to frequent, and never again ate his favorite fried hamburger with bacon and Swiss, at the diner where his mother used to work and indulge him.
He envied Lavender because she didn’t have to deal with the responsibility.
At twenty-three, Jesua would finally bury his emotions in Lake Okanogee . This I would read about in the local gazette. The remainder of his feelings was found in a three-quarters empty bottle of mint-flavored gin.
It would happen a little ways after what happened to Lavender.
Her brother occasionally returned to the trailer to check in on her. At times he stayed a few days, when one of the working girls he was seeing for a time kicked him out of her apartment for running out of money.
Coming back home, he especially noticed how much taller, skinnier, and older, Lavender had become at ten. And because Jesua was so moody and sensitive, he most decidedly refused to acknowledge his elder, Elsa was the woman’s name, because she too nearly favored his mother.
Their grandmother didn’t speak. She had been dying a slow death for years, much longer than her grandchildren were alive, and decided talking wouldn’t do her much good considering the circumstances.
Lavender was left to take care of the poor soul. She made sure to take the ailing woman to the outhouse and feed her every morning; she put crushed aspirin in some broth to make her grandmother sleep—so Lavender could finally have the day to herself.
The child preferred to traverse about town or stay near the mines, collecting pieces of coal to build miniature houses, she used bent scraps of cardboard for the roofs.
Elsa was left alone; she wouldn’t get fed again or be able to relieve herself until the evening.
Whatever love Jesua had for Lavender, and Lavender for Jesua, and whatever love both children had for their grandmother, they had their own ways of showing it.* * *
Lavender’s favorite place to go was Millers Road.
She thought nothing of the half-a-day’s walk, three miles north to the center of town and then five miles northeast, to get to the best-looking neighborhood.
She enjoyed watching the little boys and girls her age, she had seen them hundreds of times before. Between rain and heat waves and if her grandmother didn’t make a turn for the worse, Lavender was determined to go.
By the five hundred and fifty-sixth time, she decided to reveal herself to them.
To laugh and play was what she desired; Lavender thought it was all children were supposed to do. She knew Tic-Tack-Toe and Blind Man’s Bluff and I Spy; she learned how to laugh and play from the Millers Road children. That much, at least they could give her, but their superficial provisions ended there.
Lavender said to herself, there can’t be much trouble to be fitting in. She wasn’t much good for reading others, that wouldn’t be her gift.* * *
There was an equitable number of girls and boys, three for each sex. They boldly decided on a new, rather vulgar game called Spin the Bottle, the day Lavender wanted to join in. But the children had refused to play with her. Because even the children of Millers Road have limits concerning how clean their playmates were, where they came from, including what kind of clothes the parents of prospective playmates could afford.* * *
The air was thick with black dust surrounding the coal mines. Keeping a daily cleansing routine was more than an unnecessary chore for Lavender, she liked to go as she pleased once her grandmother was fast asleep.
But her face and body was dirtier than she liked, she began to resemble an uprooted potato, and there was nothing left to wear. Both Lavender’s and her grandmother’s clothes needed a proper rinse.
Lavender wore hand-me-downs, Jesua’s old denim pants from when he was a boy and his old, little boy shirts. She never had girl’s clothes of her own.
Of course, she had no parents to buy any.
She made the five-mile walk to bathe in Lake Okanogee along with a tied bundle of clothes on her back to wash and carried a bucket to fill with water to bring home for Elsa.
Lavender was disappointed about how the whole day would be wasted.* * *
The Millers Road children chased her down the road, just before the pavement made a sharp turn left, which led back into town, picking up bed rocks from their neighbors’ formulated lawns and striping tree limbs from Japanese maples on the way. To teach the girl a notable lesson once they caught up to her. Or so they expected.
The child-mob and Lavender made an equally sharp turn right, leaving their homes behind. She ran the length of a dirt path, covered by ground vines, between the overgrown hedges (I couldn’t be bothered to prune), and through the iron clad gate and up the steps.
There were twelve steps altogether—she was a sprinter.
I eventually found Lavender waiting. Waiting for her persecutors to leave, the little beasts, and waiting for me to find her. I didn’t know if the latter was true or not. My specialty was not in reading the intentions of others; I only knew no such attempt should ever be made on ones so young.
The neighboring children stopped at the gate, their group-righteousness gone. I came into the glass foyer and saw a fair-haired child with a soot face standing on the threshold. It really wasn’t much of a porch. She couldn’t see me back.
The foyer, what I used as a hothouse to grow orchids, was made entirely of frosted glass and the rectangular panes were much too difficult to see through. I didn’t need to look at the girl to know her name, where she came from, about the parents who abandoned her and the boy-man, Jesua. I knew the brownstone and brick house and wood shingle children had almost trespassed on my property.
Her grandmother Elsa had also died; the morning meal of aspirin was too much for her heart. The ailment causing her slow death was something else entirely, so it was better she was dead sooner from an overdose.
Lavender’s essence resembled something wild; the reason I thought her feline as she ascended those steps. The loose wood boards hardly made a sound. My misestimating was proof I was getting old. Nine hundred and ninety-nine to be precise, and not as good as I used to be at a hundred with sensing humans...
