Small Minutes

by Sally K. Lehman

part 2 of 4

I wait tables at a diner and pay for things with the quarters that have been left as tips.

I eat Top Ramen for dinner and listen to my stomach growl out its dismay as I lie in bed at night.

I worry about someone walking past my personal Place to Stop Awhile and stealing my dreams from me.

I don’t sleep well.

* * *

In the small minutes of night I finally sleep. My dreams lead me back to the days when my Grandmother was still alive. To the days when she was young and beautiful.

In my dreams, we sit in a field of warm grass and dandelions. We pick the flowers with the thickest stems. We slice open the fat stems with our thumbnails and slide the stem of another flower through the slit. One flower after another until we have a circle of yellow flowers. The last stem being the hardest as we have to slice it enough to allow a flower head through.

We are decorated in flower rings. Our necks, our wrists. On our heads. The yellow flowers glowing against our dark brown hair. Too many flowers to count.

We don’t talk. We sit in the absolute silence of the field with the smell of dandelions and warm grass. The warmth of the sun coming down in long, silent rays. The warmth of the grass and flowers flowing up into my body in gentle waves.

“You can’t stay here,” Grandma says. Her voice coming into my head although her mouth doesn’t move to the words.

Her voice is still the voice I knew and it seems oddly right in this younger body.

I look at her and we smile. She’s the woman in the pictures my mother has. There are no wrinkles from time and laughter. No circles of the sick she had before she died. Her smile is one that is soft and lacking the concerns that plagued her during my life.

“You can’t stay,” she repeats. Her lips move this time. Her way of making Dream Me listen.

“But I want to stay,” I say. The voice I speak with is the voice of my youth. It’s a small, uncommanding voice filled with doubts.

Grandma smiles her young smile. Her eyes smile her wise smile.

And I wake.

* * *

“You need to do something with your life,” my mother says. “Everybody needs a purpose.”

“Maybe purposelessness is my purpose,” I answer.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asks.

I shrug. I could come up with some answer if pressed, but she wouldn’t understand. She’s never understood the things my mind comes up with.

When I was a kid, my mother would say, “Audinita, I just don’t know where you come up with the things you say.” She still says it. I used to keep a running tally of how many times she’d said it. Stopped counting when I reached one hundred.

She says it now.

“Audinita, I just don’t know where you get things like that.”

New rendition - same speech. No need to start a new tally yet.

“How can purposelessness even be a thing. Every soul that God makes has a purpose.”

A continuation of the new rendition of the same speech.

“Maybe my purpose is to make you wonder what my purpose is,” I suggest.

“Audinita, that’s just pure foolishness.”

I know she’s annoyed with me when every sentence starts with my name.

“I have my purposes.”

My mother looks at me. Her eyebrows would rise and allow the full stretch of her eyelids to look at me in their questioning way, however my mother uses Botox so her brows don’t rise anymore. She can only look with her eyes now.

“I serve food to hungry people?” No comment.

“I support local business by buying stuff?” No comment still.

“I write.”

This is not a question. Not a suggestion.

I do write. My walls are covered in what I write.

“Writing doesn’t count as a purpose if you don’t try to get it published,” my mother says.

It’s an impasse we’ve reached before.

* * *

It’s Sunday so I take hold of the oversized white index cards and begin my inspection. The yellow cards are more Tolstoy than Poe today. They used to be more Byron during my poetry phase.

I fall in and out of love with different authors on a regular basis. Change my words and my phrasing to reflect my most recent crush. I write TOLSTOY on a large index card and replace the one with POE on it.

BURGESS for VONNEGUT above the blue cards.

SHAKESPEARE for DICKINSON on my poetry wall above the bathroom sink - purple index cards held up with some yellow masking tape I can find regularly at the craft store over off Stark Street.

Changes made and the old cards get shredded. POE turning into P, O, and E. The P becoming a line and a piece of the line and pieces of the piece of line. VONNEGUT follows then DICKINSON. All the paper pieces of discarded names carefully placed into the Recycle bin.

I land on the blue and purple plaid chair and look around my Place. The walls thickly covered with index cards of varied colors. The cards divided by strips of masking tape to define one story from the next. I scan these walls of my work and to see what’s missing. The afternoon turns to dark and I go to bed. Another Sunday’s work done.

* * *

My Grandmother’s Grandmother was a For Sale Bride from the Washo Indian Tribe. My Grandmother’s Grandfather bought her from the Tribal Council for fifty dollars, which was a lot back then. I’ve seen old pictures of her and can tell he must have been smitten by her to pay so much. She was quite beautiful.

Grandma always said that I got my high cheek bones from this For Sale Bride’s blood. I got my strong jaw line and determined nature from her as well.

Anything negative about me, Grandma says that comes from my father’s side.

* * *

I remember when my Grandma died. My mother stood stoically by the Columbia River as Grandma’s ashes were sent back to the world. I asked her if she ever regretted all the fights they’d had.

“I never started them, so I don’t regret them,” she said.

I wonder sometimes if she ever cried.

* * *

“The only reason to have children is so you can have grandchildren,” Grandma always said. Mostly when she and my mother were fighting. Especially when they were fighting about me.

“You had no right to name the child while I was unconscious from the C-Section-Drugs!”

My mother argued this one note regularly, even though it happened a long while ago.

“You know a child must be named within the first hour of its life, or else the spirits will moor themselves to the child’s soul,” Grandma said. Her usual answer given in her deep, knowing voice.

Grandma made up these traditions when she thought she could. She told me about it once. My mother never noticed.

* * *

“It’s a God-awful name!” my mother would yell near the end of those fights.

“It’s reflective of our heritage!” Grandma would answer.

“Which heritage?” my mother would yell.

“All of them!” Grandma would answer.

* * *

When I was little, I wondered what C-Section-Drugs were. I imagined them as red things that float in the air and are shaped like the letter ‘C.’ That they would grab a person and force babies out. When I had the baby tarantulas in me, I stayed indoors and avoided all C-shaped things.

I wonder why I didn’t think “Sea,” like a body of water.

My mother says it’s because I was born knowing how to read. Therefore I was born knowing the alphabet.

* * *

I asked my Grandmother once why she chose the name Audinita for me.

“To piss off your mother,” she said.

* * *

Grandma always said that my mother was caught up too much in her religion.

“You know, Audinita, George Orwell said it best in that one book of his. Religion, he said, is ‘the most absorbing game ever invented, because it goes on for ever and because just a little cheating is allowed’.”

Grandma liked to quote from books.

“A Clergyman’s Daughter,” I said.

“A what?”

“A Clergyman’s Daughter, Grandma. It’s the name of the book.”

“Oh,” she said.

“That,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter which book,” she said. “What matters is that your mother is merely caught up in the nasty game of religion. It will lead nowhere.”

I wondered if Grandma had just stepped all over another of the Seven Deadly.

My mother would know.

* * *

In the small minutes of morning one of the waitresses from the day shift at Dee’s was raped and beaten. Her name is Alison. She was taking a bag of trash out to the dumpster in the alley behind. The manager, who insists we call him Mr. Sevick, found her. He went out to see what was keeping her and she was lying on the cold concrete with her bag of trash thrown on top of her.

The other morning girl, Jenny, refused to go home. She insisted on waiting in the back room and having one of the dishwashers walk her to her apartment.

When I got to work at six o’clock that night, four of the other people from Dee’s had already called me to tell me to be careful.

They’d called to tell me that Alison was alive.

They’d called to tell me that Alison was having to get tested for HIV.

They’d called to tell me that Alison was spending the night in the hospital.

That night at work, I looked at every man who came in to eat and wondered. It seemed obvious to me that the man who had done this thing to Alison was someone who knew us. Someone who was a regular.

Jenny quit the next day. She moved back in with her parents in a Portland ’burb. She called me to tell me that she would rather lose her independence than lose her life.

The manager who insists we call him Mr. Sevick asked me to move to day shift.

* * *

My mother heard about what happened at Dee’s and called me. “You have to quit your job,” my mother said. “You have to move back in with me so I can keep you safe.”

I could tell by her tone that she didn’t want me to accept. It was her “I am doing this because a good mother would” tone. Her tone which cuts across a phone line three pitches higher than her regular voice.

“That sounds like a really good idea,” I said.

Her voice back to its normal tone. “Oh,” she said.

“Do you really think so?” she said.

“Well, I’m sure I would feel a lot safer,” I said.

I made sure to raise the tone of my voice at the end of the sentence to make her believe that I was questioning the idea of staying in my Place. Questioning my safety. Questioning if I should move back to the haven of my mother’s home.

“I suppose,” she said. Her tone was flat at the end of her words. Meaning she would rather I think things over a little longer. Meaning she would rather not put up with me. “You’d have to drive further to get there.”

“I could bring all my index cards, right?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I suppose you would have to, wouldn’t you.” She had put on her lower, “if you must” voice.

“Maybe I’ll think it over a little more,” I said.

“That’s probably for the best,” she said.

My mother tries to be the perfect mother. To say the perfect mother things. To give the perfect mother reactions. The perfect mother protectiveness.

Lucky for her I’m not the perfect daughter.

* * *