Soft
Touch
He
once got hit by a playground and it was all over for him with pockets. He couldn’t eat breakfast for all the empty
spaces. Holes distracted him. It was “as a child.” But he wandered like a blank, sputtered, lost
it.
The
mind is a soft substance, a kind of pudding.
Two million people have it, and it’s caused by things we think are
fun. By entertainment. Everyone has been touched by it in some
way. Soft touch.
When
we married and I sat with him in a park or office, he would want to call me at
home. “I want to call Cathy.” And I would say, “But I am Cathy. I’m here.
I’m your wife.” And he’d say,
swingset, “I know you are, but I want to call the other Cathy.” And so later
at home there’d be a recording of his voice on the machine: “I just wondered
what you were doing right now.” A
machine. A recording.
Was
the other Cathy living in our house like a sock, like a closet, a shadow, a
snake? Was I another Cathy? She became a palatable oatmeal on my tongue,
on his. Me. The other Cathy. The other wife. The one he’d call when I was right by
him.
“Is
the other Cathy like me?” I asked him.
“Oh, no,” he said. “You’re a lot
easier to talk to.” And I felt a little
bad for Cathy then. The other me. But I had been the one feeding him out of my
enormous pockets. My big white
blouse. The other Cathy was just the
hole in his morning meal, a fruit you open.
People
get impacted by a game or a junglegym or some other form of violence and when
they wander away I see them. I guess they
could be more angry, suddenly very sweet, or afraid of bridges. In love with a thing they never knew
before. A slight shift in soup chemistry
is all it takes. And with the damage,
two million alternate brothers and lovers turn, straight-mouthed, towards the
dishes in the kitchen sink, waiting for the call.
"Soft Touch" originally appeared in Arielle Greenberg's first collection, Given (Wave Books, 2002), which you can learn more about on her website here.
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