Ch 16 Part 2 – The Pheromones of Coming Home

Chapter Sixteen – The Pheromones of Coming Home Part 2

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Elyse and I conversed on the phone.  We parceled through that wonderful and sobering dissipation of the enamored idealism of initial dating.  We deciphered the perfunctory coating of what a person could be over who we actually were.  The endorphin rush of grand expectation was bliss.

I assigned Elyse Green Day’s, “She’s a Rebel,” as her ringtone.  It sounded out like an anthem of new every time I heard her calling.  We captured the stages of courtship, the feelings of swelled-up infatuation and shifting aerial winds of navigating a shore bird and a raven’s mutual landing point. 

Elyse’s sizes were like FBI agent secret code for knowing what a man should know, but not disclose.  Sweater small, pants six, shirts medium, but do not buy me clothes.  Shoes, seven and a half, fingers smallest four or five, neck eleven to twelve, head small, hair whatever fancy strikes.  Bra, thirty-two C, panty, medium, colors purple and gray.  Metal of choice: gold, not platinum scratches easily. 

Elyse was painted in natural pose accoutrements and biometrics of a mature woman.  Like an eyelash fluttering down from a blink that stared that millisecond too long, I was gone.  I hoped I could catch the lash before it fluttered into the haystack.  

Elyse had that additive credence of beauty.  I could sense it aesthetically in herC appearance lofting there like an angelic coating.  Natural externally-beautiful people may be oblivious to this additive.  They may allocate all manner of increased attention from others throughout their youth to an internal font, which for any of us, as visual beings, is a partial truth.

A history of lunch time routines, dating rituals and a social system of salutations is erected in a hierarchy with this layered aesthetic appendage as prime foundation.  No one can be culpable for their genetics.  The positives and negatives correlated with such a visage are arbitrary, yet applicable.  So in this, sexual appeal is like an exponential enhancement to take the components of the internal and award bonus points in the ranking system of an organism’s universal social structure. 

In my self-acknowledged banal face, mediocre height and mundane historical ranking verified by the modest reciprocated interest of the opposing gender, this additive was not all together novel, as in high school Marie possessed such social latitude.  However, with an age surpassing thirty, collisions of time such as collegiate matriculation, offspring, debt, housing and internal maturation were far more prevalent factors included with appearance.

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I was getting to know idiosyncratic tendencies.  Elyse moved her eyebrow up and to the left when she was nervous.  Elyse was into Deepak Chopra’s theories on Ayurveda and a charismatic modern day Christian Church of the Lord after Catholicism left her hungry.  Her Bible tagged along in her glove compartment and a crucifix hung on her rearview mirror.

Elyse had energetic passions and was so sincere if you could get past the turtle shell.  Elyse was spontaneous, fickle and impulsive, a “live in the moment” flavor of girl.  Elyse had a mercurial bit of A.D.D. fancy.  Always a new taste, but the same beautiful fashion and can not help but be sweet heart.

Elyse was a self-preservationist to the nth degree.  Elyse was a “Must Love Dogs” poster-child and a “Mad Max” non-apologetic pink background with a brown mud paw-print mutt vagabond beauty. 

Elyse grew up parenting her parents who divorced when Elyse was twelve and split across the country.  Elyse’s parents were neither demons nor saints, just preoccupied, which fostered Elyse’s own independent self-appointed emancipation.  Elyse’s oldest brother Paulo was eight years older and raised in a different home with the same roof. 

Elyse tried everything growing up.  Elyse wanted to taste all the snowball-drizzled flavors.  Her devotion was not one of a quitter, but of a yearning to experience the ski slope, the dance, the jujitsu class, the surf on Venice beach, the Biblical passage, the nightclub reverberation and every taste in between.  Elyse was shark-like; if she was not swimming or moving she was not breathing.  Sitting still suffocated the girl.

482

April 22, 2010, I got a postcard from Philadelphia.  The script of “Just saying hello” and transposable backdrop of a Liberty Bell was followed by an “Enjoy!”  I could decipher that fifteen-year-old girl curved circular female motion in Elyse’s handwriting that indicated an, “I want him to know I am thinking about him, without appearing overt or defining of what this is or is not” level of atomic magnetism via the postal service. 

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In between Elyse’s return from Philadelphia and adventure in New York I planned a night out with her in my Nottoway confines.  I mentioned going out to eat, but decided the morning of that I wanted to cook for Elyse.  I wanted to ease the pressure of my own story of divorce in a semblance of joint acknowledgment.  Elyse was not asking for a narrative, not needing any explanation.  I needed to alleviate pressure through discourse in order to operate towards a progressive dynamic.

I made a Greek salad with feta cheese, red onions in a vinaigrette, tomatoes, and fresh oregano.  For the side I roasted eggplant rounds, covered in red and yellow peppers in olive oil, with chopped basil, marjoram and feta cheese.  For the main course I made shrimp pasta in a cream sauce with a slight bit of jalapeño, garlic, tomato, in heavy whipping cream.  I forgot to water the cream down, but the mixture came out well.  I sprinkled parsley, basil and smoked Gouda on the top. 

I got the house clean, chopped ingredients, peeled and deveined the shrimp, figured out the timing and ordering and showered.  The dishes were put away.  The pot was on the stove.  The salads were in the fridge in covered bowls.  I was ready when Elyse arrived. 

I gave Elyse a little tour except for my bedroom.  I showed her Penelope’s room and playroom.  Elyse knew what Montessori was.  We talked about the art I made.

We shared a funny, enlightening, and tender conversation over dinner.  Twenty minutes later we sat on my sofa with our glasses of Chardonnay.  Elyse told me a story about how earlier she went to lunch with her mom.  Her mother broke up with some guy and then had a date with a new guy the next day.  Her mom asked Elyse if she thought that was ok.  We laughed and contrasted the paradoxes of role reversals.

I shared the cliff notes version of my divorce story.  I partly felt like I laid down a dead body in Elyse’s ears.  I became my loquacious-self, infantile and in need of a feminine bassinet to nuzzle my speech.  I wanted to quit sipping mercury drops in my drinking water.  I had a forest with a year and a half overgrowth of brambles to light afire.  

I needed someone to know.  I felt guilty.  Every erupting-bud word felt like a burden-thorn.  I knew Elyse was not asking.  I needed a landscape architect to help blade back these hedge-maze monsters made of mignonette vines, Guinea grass, bladderwort, and primrose willow. 

I got the perfunctory bullet-point blabber out like a supporting actor Oscar nomination, but there was no reason to watch the film again after a premiere.  I needed to put a back story into open air.  I did not want my history to suffocate me inside as something bigger than what it actually was. 

I did not want to gamble future misunderstandings in inevitable relayed peripheral anecdotes about my past, because I never addressed the crucible at the impetus.  I also did not want to appear overly emphatic to its importance.  I wanted Elyse to know me.  Elyse listened in a resonate gift of empathy.  We paced the evening forward without many follow up questions.

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Elyse’s was going to be in New York for her birthday.  At the end of the night I gave Elyse a little pink bag with a note and a Storyville New Orleans T-shirt and the irises from the table.

A Birthday Wish, I am glad you were born.  For however selfish or naive this may sound in the infancy of our introduction, there is a beauty in you in bloom, sparkling for this world magnetically meaningful to remember and wherever this may lead between us, I intend to recall it.  I am happy that you are part of the earth and lament the tardiness of our introduction. 

For the days set in motion, from your first to this, our paths however parallel have crossed.  And with the abolition of my ignorance to your existence, I wish you for the first time in my days, a joyous remembrance of your birth.  Happy birthday beautiful, Ethan

Elyse was aglow.  What if in my ignorance prospered an assumption of awe?  Would Elyse hold back waiting for the realization to detonate?  The plumbing of the human heart is ruled by such inevitable natural currents.  Faith has a home in our very biology.

I called and wished Elyse a happy birthday on the morning of her actual solar revolution anniversary.  We spoke from an honest place, a home, a spot that did not feel effort-filled or contrived, but a pit that permeated solace.  Despite the days in between, these first sounds awaked a smile-inducing ease. 

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In April, I went to Jazz Fest with Tim.  We saw The Dirty Dozen Brass Band with their double-trumpet player, Rebirth with “Who Na Neh’s”, Galactic’s groove and then Pearl Jam.  Tim had started his own punk band with two of his friends.  I danced to the funk and rhythms.  The NOLA spirit made me feel alive.  I sopped up oyster bisque and drank strawberry lemonade. 

Being at outdoor shows like that is like God gave you this cylindrical circle descended from the heavens to encompass your halo-space to dance inside and feel the vibe of this shared musical congregation of humanity.  Everything you feel and witness is a collective extrapolation of thousands of other parallel examples swarming around you. 

Galactic had cameos by Cyril Neville, Irma Thomas and Trombone Shorty in their set.  Pearl Jam was just as good as I remembered.  I saw them play eighteen years before on my high school football field at Tad Gormley Stadium in City Park with the Ramones opening the show during Pearl Jam’s bout with Ticketmaster. 

During this current concert Pearl Jam had a live video and audio link to Marines in Afghanistan where Eddie Vedder and the audience were talking to a captain in the 512^th division who was a friend of the band.  Vedder also had some words for BP about that awful spill out in the Gulf.  It was a beautiful yellow-ledbetter escape. 

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The night before Elyse left for New York, Elyse and I went for drinks at a bar alongside Lake Pontchartrain.  We talked about random personality types.  We chatted about people who complain about being subjected to converse loquaciously in an expansive lexicon.  Would the world of adults be happier to speak with an eight-color box of crayons?  We pondered if humans had to have super powers to verbalize six syllables words sans stuttering.  (Elyse was a fan of the medical dictionary.) 

We talked about not making apologies to the self-absorbed people sitting on their hands asking to be entertained.  We talked about roller skating on the beach in Santa Monica and Toronto boutiques.

We walked in the grass draped in the dark.  The whipping winds hurled mist.  We were alone pacing from the bar to a lakeside bench.  Elyse nuzzled her shoulder under the pit of my arm in a vertical Lego-click.  Elyse had a black cashmere hoodie.  I called her a ninja sneaking through the unusual chill in the night thrusting off the water. 

The waves crashed in like the end of sunken days.  The park bench was a springboard, a trapeze leaping-point past questions of if I still felt Elyse was guarded.  I held Elyse.  In the s curve of my neck and my shoulder, Elyse found a swan’s nesting place.  In that passage of allowance I felt Elyse’s breathing change.  Her tempo synchronized to hear my pulse like a backbeat to the speeds of finding an elusive median.

Elyse’s kiss was like feathers breaking with softness and the power of a lightning-thief blazing.  The movement shocked me with the quake of a burden lifting and a grace descending.  My questions were in the fire melting.  I felt more alive in the best day of my year anxious and patient that this was my quotient, denominator of one.  I uncovered divisibility without subtraction when adding the numerator of a greater fraction in the sum of my hopes.

I knew Elyse did not want to go.  Elyse was not pulling away.  I felt her kitten in the compressions.  There was a feathering breeze in digits on skin.  We kissed in tenderness like a flying carpet moving miles of rolled-up years in seconds of elevated freedoms allowed.  The swell expounded onto Elyse’s hand in the cup of my abdomen like a holster for Elyse’s touch.  The hours past one a.m. began to erase the consequence of dawn. 

487

Elyse emailed me a picture with her brother from Times Square after they saw “Red” on Broadway.  From Jamaica, Elyse told me stories about her friend falling in love with a Californian fireman calendar poster-boy on the beaches of Negril.  Life was traveling.  Elyse missed home.

In those months Elyse and I started a course in each other.  Elyse was not a morning person.  She practiced a scaled accent to each day, coffee, and protein over carbohydrates or lactose.  Elyse was into eggs and almond butter.  As a child her artistic side was piano, dance, and painting with an ankle-wade through each.  Elyse liked to go to a twenty-four hour fitness center to work out in the evenings rather than get sucked into television.

I spent hours on the island of my car hood sailed to align with the linked-azimuth of cell phone reception to continue our phone conversations.  I lived in the Bermuda Triangle of cell phone death.  The mosquitoes bit my bare feet when I did not have time to locate socks prior to relocating to the driveway to answer Elyse’s phone calls. 

I would set Penelope’s kindergarten baby monitor on the porch on the fringe of its capabilities.  The listening component would flash and buzz red-bars at the static sounds like a house-arrest prisoner’s ankle bracelet sending out-of-range signals.  I tried to set the digital-parental surveillance as close as possible, but there was an approximate seven foot differential between a green bar on the monitor and a sufficient accumulation of cell phone bars to accumulate to an operable summation.

I would lie on that hood staring up at the hick-town stars.  The angles from everywhere else on this globe were not so much and all so much different.  I appreciated the hand full of hours pressed together into grapes of communication, juiced and barreled and so rarely given the time to drink. 

Elyse made me smile in elucidating moments of potential.  I tried to hold back, to not trip over the feet of my right-footed logic with my left-footed emotions shoe-laced in premature bindings.  We were dancing towards some junction where I would inevitably attempt to sweep Elyse off her feet.  I wondered if Elyse would be ready for such overtures.  I eschewed caution. 

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Elyse loved dance music like a soundtrack to light up a non-lyrical orchestra.  Elyse lived in the beat, the movement, the thump and the swerve.  Elyse was an in the club-tune woman wanting to straddle the stage unafraid of burning and dying to heroin-catchy rhythms like a Russian mayfly only alive in the song.  Elyse grabbed my wrist to usher me out to let the world go and dance to some pop-dance beat I would have never otherwise listened to feel intoxicatingly alive.

Elyse was statuesque independence, this projection of strength.  Underneath her humanity reverberated. I could sense the tremors of her insecurity, of wanting to be loved, but unsure what the response would be or if the respondent was suitable.  Elyse was in the very normal struggle of maturing at thirty-something.  We were both crossing that precipice and still unsure.  

Elyse pondered why I wanted her, what did I see in her.  What did she see in me?  I wrote her a poetic letter of why’s after one of our conversations to address one end of this polarity. 

I see a grace and respect for that which is greater than self.  I see a place for God, a diligence to self-betterment.  I see what you do not say.  I see a woman more complete with: no picture in a bar, no undisciplined remarks, no victim for sale, no definition of a diva impaled upon a cross searching for a man to save her from or praise her for her cause.

Of all things natural to explain in inches rather than miles I see your picture in an attraction fraction of one indivisible quotient of joy, that there is beauty in blue eyes and golden skin smiling and not knowing what she is holding in not made up in products in a glamour parade trying to convince the world, a simple esteem covered in honest presentation, not bosomed projections, but an honest beauty refined.

I see a balance of the boat on the water’s sway reciprocal emotions playing out in the apex of your smile like a blossom upon your left cheek in a duality of fear and joy of what was and what is the man before you.

I see a dancer on the midway squirming and nervous that in the quiet spaces, love and better than just might be possible.  I am timid yet hoping to utter a gardener’s byproduct of words to bloom from this mutual cloistered silence.  I want you in my life.

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I was becoming vulnerable to Elyse like a man treading with a scissor kick and arms forming semi-circles in a foreign ocean cognizant of the nature of sharks.  Everything in my life was available for her in my candor and the parts still unspoken sat like pies cooling on a window sill for when she was ready.  Elyse was concerned about her own past.  Everybody has exes and experiences.  We were turning the rusted valve counterclockwise; to release respective damns and re-flood a valley with enriched soil retained in back stories.  We all have penciled in names we no longer call ourselves.

These former boyfriends, stories of older men, high school twenty-twos, college thirty-twos, recent forty-twos.  Competition and disengagement with layers of can-not-place-in-this-decade men, in any bin but irrelevant to an us.  I was distinguishing the differences between blind turn-offs hidden in the background and what was alive now regardless of what preceded this.  Other guys, other envy’s, other lives, and none of it mattered 

Surely Ashley was a bigger monster for Elyse to contend with than any skeletal figure in Elyse’s closet for me to dissect.  If I could set aside Ashley in this compressed vice of a town to allow Elyse to feel like she had room, then maybe our ghost had a chance to materialize to a viable body.

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All these months and years were stacked like dominoes ready to fall | | | | | /.  The domino-days faltered me in their pondered iterations.  Elyse and I could see them toppling.  We counted the dots to compute the tipping-point of /_ or /\, a flat fall or a mutual leaning support in two humans toppling in unison of symmetrical burden and succor.  That balance required relinquishing control. 

I realized the dangers of verbose narratives on emotional commentary that were often better-debated in forays of skin and lips and fingertips.  These physical combinations were like pouring kerosene on a hearth. 

For too long I felt a need to bond and converse at fifty-thousand meters deep.  I thought who would ever want to slum down by these angler fish with built-in lighting systems to investigate my albino-world.  The pressure of the depth was over due for a rising.  Life was coming in simple, warm and with Elyse’s pair of polarized sunglasses permanently attached like flip-down insulation window soul-shields to manage the free-dive.

God was wagging her finger at me saying, “See I told you so,” at all the broken steps to here.  Elyse had her string of her mother, her father, her brothers and past relationships of being nowhere near number one in their lives.  Elyse showed me the monsters, the flowers, and the joys under her bed and tattooed to her back.

Elyse’s childhood was Freddie Kruger movies and Cinemax, Growing Pains and New Kids on the Block daydreams.  Elyse told me she was a happy child, but there was perpetual segmentation from normal allowances of childhood that was contingent on parental convenience.  Elyse felt the numb-sting of apathy too often.

Elyse was left to have college-age boyfriends in high school permissible whenever she elected.  Keg-party possibilities prompted Elyse’s own self-imposed abstinence.  Elyse had to be her own parent and set her own boundaries.  Elyse was ignored.  Other worries were prioritized.  The parental-legislation most teenagers rebel against was decriminalized in a deafening silence of, “we trust you.”  Elyse was an honors student and graduated salutatorian.

Elyse’s mother, father and brothers kept secrets.  As individuals they each chose priorities in crucible moments of disengaged hierarchy.  These frail disconnects led Elyse to misanthropic tendencies and Jesus.

Elyse chose to set her soul like steel and galvanize a core of who she was and would be.  Elyse chose to have the faith to rise above that which could have broken her into a thousand pieces of shrapnel to fly like a phoenix as this amazing woman. 

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Elyse opened up to me.  Elyse taught me the beauty of chocolate to a woman.  I got a behind the gendered curtain view of the reactionary chemistry in a soul of simple sugar and cocoa.  Chocolate is permission to be flawed, to be imperfect, to indulge, and to release.  Chocolate is orgasmic in the same ripple process of allowing herself a vulnerable love, to have a man inside a woman’s castle fortress of being strong for everyone.  Chocolate is that latitude to lie back in the grass, to see the sparrows nest and the blue sky reign in pause of her constant watch. 

A woman strives in secret or public to be disappointment to none and respectful of the beauty the world expects her to hold.  Her frail beauty that she doubts and frets upon its magnitude, its value.  She prays that silk-strung spider high-wire line to ballerina tip-toe across the confidence to see herself as beautiful coming from within and from the men in her life.  Every girl grows and finds a balance across that line internal and external.

These satellites of daddy-planet, is he present?  Does he love her clearly and true independent of smile, in the grace displayed in her step, in the rouge on her cheeks?  Is she on constant watch not to tripwire his alarms, to upset the troll?  This manful figure can reduce her beautiful castle to stump size in the simple frowned expression if love on that wire is not secure. 

She is vulnerable from day one without realizing it.  She spends the rest of her life sand bagging, mortaring, reinforcing walls to guard against this awakened seven-year-old knowledge of the power of what daddy can do.  In the most secure of girls, daddy helps build the castle walls with her.  He adds spade and hammer to her toolbox, each day to stare this world of men bluntly to have the gall to be blazingly unfeminine when called upon.  He is her Virgil sweltering safari guide.  He is her cartographer of testosterone, this foreign body elixir that can exalt or crush her dreams with each undulating wave.

Chocolate can open the drawbridge for that sweet sensory of lightening the fixation on the weighted image of monumental backdrop considerations partitioning her superego into that core girl swaddled in pure self-identity playing innocently in a meadow.  She can imagine there, petal-undress there and sing, act, be, bleed without restriction and speak.  She can have her words held on tea saucers in a party of promise that these sentences will be considered as valid, not judged, not condemned, but held.  Her words can be caressed and returned to her unadulterated.  In the sanctuary a man and woman perfected can balance on that wire.  She can bloom weightless.

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It was time for Elyse to meet Penelope.  I talked to Penelope about my girlfriend and what that did and did not mean.  Penelope seemed to have this Cracker Jack-box of thoughts.  Her mother had Ben as a prevalent protagonist in Penelope’s days away from me.  A corresponding figure on her father’s allotment seemed comprehendible. 

I mentioned Elyse in context a few times.  After seeing a dog I related that daddy’s friend Ms. Elyse has a pug named Bilbo.  Penelope was in a difficult to access position.  Penelope’s fits were still present.  Her lack of predictability was real.  I was hesitant to introduce more change before I felt Penelope was ready. 

The females met on a Saturday in polite and kind fashion at our breakfast/dining table at the rental.  Elyse brought a pony coloring book and a smile.  We colored.  Elyse gave Penelope space and knew Penelope’s kid-fear feelings.  I was limited to sympathetic radar.  Elyse had historical empathy.  The intersections of Penelope and Elyse came to pass on occasion, but the bulk of Elyse and me’s time was spent in Penelope’s absence. 

Nottoway life was entering the summer of 2010.  The porch-house still sat like an eight-month old Halloween pumpkin reeking rancid.  Ben was sleeping in my old bedroom, that I technically still owned.  The carpet in my rental gave Elyse horrible allergies.  More than a few hours made Elyse sneeze and constricted her breathing.  The plumbing was old.  The carpet was stained.  The cell reception was still the Elba of wireless death.

Elyse and I each had opposite end concerns for the constraints of Nottoway being a prerequisite for any life we could build together.  How could I encourage the woman I was attempting to love to sacrifice her own dreams to reside in a place I did not even want to be myself?  My heart was in love; my logical mind saw chains on my ankles and an unlovable prisoner-Edmund Dantes pleading with the Priest limited in what he could give in this Château d'If.  How could I feel in such extremes?

This was not infatuation.  This was not some pebble skipping a pond.  We both knew what this was.  The days we were counting did not allow us to exchange labels, but I knew we both knew.  The pacifying blanket of abolished ignorance was peaceful, exhilarating and pushed my face back into the mud pie of Nottoway. 

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I did not want to change one skin cell of Elyse’s beautiful humanity.  We fit and clicked like a puzzle piece of intricate turns and curves.  Together the severed clouded bits of colors merged into the clearest picture hidden behind all the Jackson-Pollock separated smears.  I was painting in irreversible tones.  These were the permanent marks parents warned children not to use for fear of ruining garments.  I saw Michelangelo dabbling on my ceilings and Van Gogh in my flower bed.  Whatever subsequently happened, life was imprinting an impossibility to wash away the colors from the canvas.

I was nesting in the feathers of Elyse’s aortas.  I was a man carrying each grain of sand on a Benadir beach to Kilimanjaro.  I was giving Elyse everything I could, but I was still a turtle man on a shoreline hatching alone years too late absent huddled-shield egg-mates.  I was dodging the gulls to grow in a foreign ocean.  My shell was older than my limbs.

I never viewed myself as uniquely incapable of being understood or weird.  There was a part of me that always felt wandering.  We all have a want to connect in our deepest emotional nudity.  That yearning is what makes love so powerful.  I felt like Elyse understood me better than anybody ever had, yet even with Elyse I did not know how to drop these things I carried. 

Sometimes Elyse felt trapped, like she could not breathe.  Elyse wanted to scamper to hide from the catcher in the rye field of her doubts about my ability to let go.  Elyse would come to me fearful, yet hungry for the grocery bags of my compassion.  Elyse acknowledged that if she did not, she knew she would begin to detach.

Ashley was a voracious caterpillar.  Elyse was my beautiful blue morpho butterfly with under-wing eyes batting.  Elyse did not run.  She kept communicating despite the lopsided configurations of all that I was asking and so ignorant of the spider webs wrapped like a bola around my shins.

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One night Penelope, Elyse and I were at my rental.  Elyse felt that third-wheel disposition of role in our dynamic.  The odd numerology did not suit Elyse’s demeanor or historical familial line-up card to the umpire.  Elyse wanted to even the equation by heading home.

I held Elyse.  We talked.  We stayed to watch the Swan Princess movie.  I made homemade chicken nuggets and honey mustard dressing.  Elyse sat on Penelope’s bed as I read Penelope her story.  Elyse helped with the dishes.  I felt the tiniest bottom end of the Richter scale of a family.

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Other days the sway of that ocean was more turbulent.  Penelope occasionally acted out to push the boundaries.  Elyse said the lack of control that I had over Penelope could be a deal breaker if things did not change.  Elyse knew enough about kids that Penelope did not listen or respect me.  I could tell Elyse felt pushed into a corner.  These struggles Penelope had were not Elyse’s burden to bear.  What if it was just too soon?  Elyse should not have to feel like second or put in the corner ever again. 

Elyse suggested using something like stickers for positive reinforcement.  I got a blank rules chart and some gold star, “way to go,” and big airplane stickers from a local educational supply store.  I sat down with Penelope and talked to her about rules for our home.  We made a two-column list.

Penelope and I each wrote a side.  I helped with the spelling.  One list was for good behaviors the other side bad.  Underneath each column were the consequences of those actions.  Listening and helping create a beautiful nature and play dates and trips to the zoo.  Hitting and fits create time-out and loss of toys with set numbers and times.

I marked each day of Penelope’s puppy calendar with either an M or a D in the bottom right corner for the entire year to indicate where she would sleep that night.  I highlighted the date number of the D days in yellow.  Each day with Daddy was an opportunity for a sticker.  If Penelope did not do any of the bad things and did the good things she would retain a gold star sticker.  One mess up was a regular “way to go” sticker and a fit or hitting meant no sticker.  If Penelope got at least ten stickers on her Daddy-days during a month a special second poster would get a big airplane sticker marked with the month.  Four airplane stickers would get a big reward like a toy store trip or a play date. 

Penelope took to the system quickly.  Penelope craved the structure.  The daily routine was fun while displaying causal relationships in the background of Penelope’s psyche in an age-appropriate manner.  We marked off our day each night before I put Penelope to bed.  We colored in the calendar square and applied Penelope’s sticker. 

Penelope could see where she was going to be the next day and how many days until a transition occurred.  The omnipresent divorced-progeny quandary of “where to next” was answered.  Penelope’s fear of being whirled away in a Kansas tornado was grounded to a focal point.  Her focus oriented and stabilized to begin to live calmly in our home with a predictable daily construct.  Part of the process was Elyse’s help, part me, and part Penelope.  The calendar became a wonderful systematic conduit for structure and love in my life with my daughter.

I wanted to put the woman in my life first, but reality was restrictive.  Penelope’s demands for attention were exorbitant at times.  Penelope was manipulating me.  I tried to help teach Penelope to play by herself in intervals.  Penelope’s seesaw life made her a half-junkie on an opiate of maternal appeasement with six kinds of kisses and thirteen required-goodbyes.  There were no lines drawn.  Any deviation by approaching a boundary or my contradictory style resulted in Penelope’s ire. 

One Sunday we did yoga then played Pegasus, unicorn, pony and horse where Penelope pretended the levitating winged-equines could poop rainbows.  I asked for ten minutes of time for myself.  Penelope threw a fit exclaiming, “I don’t know how!” and “I haven’t spent enough time with you yet.”  I felt like a buck in headlights trying to find balance between the beam and my own sanctuary of forest.  This was a no sticker day.

496

I felt guilty over dictating the terms of the way Elyse and me’s life as a couple was constrained by Penelope’s existence.  I wanted to balance a peace that Elyse was not going to resent me for not appreciating her choice to accept these less-ideal variables in the equation.  If I displayed an elevated level of appreciation to compensate I could create a divergent unhealthy dynamic.  Penelope and I needed more time together.  That allocation did not have to extricate Elyse, but the Penelope of spring 2010 was still in the chrysalis.  Penelope and I needed our own version of settled, yet settled felt impossible.

Elyse began to appear despondent, distant and difficult to read in some of our interactions with Penelope.  I felt like this huge piece of my life was a burden to Elyse.  Ashley was still in the background spouting her blanket indefensible-conjecture into Penelope’s mind, and my email and bank accounts.  Ashley pumped out sewer subterfuge and sabotage of “daddy does not want to be around you” and referred to all these people with “concerns” that were conveniently nameless or part of Ashley’s immediate clan. 

Elyse could feel Ashley’s presence in town, despite never meeting, because the radiation was still reverberating in me.  I was pre-chemo and toxic.

This parental triangle was the reason Elyse and I could not just pick up and move to New Orleans, Philadelphia, or Seattle if we ever desired.  Elyse was torn.  I felt this rock-like “almost do not know what else to feel” resentment from Elyse and from myself.  Sometimes I did not know how much my own guilt prompted Elyse’s concerns in “chicken or the egg” style logic. 

Elyse went with me to pick out a few bathing suits for Penelope and a purple lunch bag for summer camp.  We went to the zoo and flew kites.  One Sunday morning, Elyse even sat through a drive-through lane of Catholic mass at St. Mark’s with me.  Ashley was sitting with Ben Bastion and Penelope across the crescent-moon-shaped pews in the congregation.  The flavor of religion and the company gave Elyse motion sickness.  Two sides and no talking, Elyse remembered the stoic stagnant Catholic faith of her childhood and that was enough of a reminder to desist any second scoops.

497

One Saturday morning while I was picking up Penelope, Ashley asked me, “What is your new girlfriend’s last name?  I have a right to know.  It affects Penelope.”  In the back of my mind I thought, “Sure, so you can have Clay Robertson run a background check like you told me Lacey use to do illegally on people when she worked for the sheriff’s office.”  Penelope had been talking.  I said, “We have separate lives.  What I do is none of your business.”  Ashley replied, “Tell me her name.”  I stood for a minute and said, “What about Ben?”  “What do you want to know?” Ashley retorted.  I asked, “When was the first time the two of you slept together?  When did the emotional affair start?”

Ashley morphed into her most petulant child foot-stomper Veruca Salt.  Penelope was inside.  Hilton was in the kitchen.  Ashley busted out, “Dad, Ethan is accusing me of having an affair!”  That ended the interrogatories.  I never got an answer.  I later found out from Elyse that Ashley was getting friend requests via Facebook, from acquaintances of Ashley’s to try to pry into her life.  Elyse did not have sudden friends from Nottoway.  Ashley had her Augustus Gloop and Violet Beauregarde consiglieres.

498

Elyse and I made time for ourselves.  We went to see Avenue Q at the Mahalia Jackson Theater in New Orleans.  We got dressed-up to see puppets talk about the fallacies of a college education, the ABC’s of debt, homosexuality, and love.  Gen X stitched fuzzy buddies had areola-exposed drunken puppet sex.  The Internet is for porn.  We set the world aside.  We went out to dinner at Brigtsen’s and bathed in the sparks.

499

June 18, 2010, on a Friday I wrote Elyse a poem to tell her how I felt.  I wanted to say the words. 

The Pheromones of Coming Home

There is a piece of you in me now that I know will never leave me, where ever I go this blessing will permeate like an aroma of fated touch slipped beneath my skin like a glossed note upon an air conditioned frosted window pane 

Written with your fingertip imprinting upon the change in temperature, yet even as the morning breaks and the Celsius transfers the heat through the glass to a more equitable distribution of Kelvin and Fahrenheit, the coding of your record would functionally exist like a backdrop to every subsequent sunrise

To how I will look out upon these days rising from the nadirs of blanket charcoal midnights to the pierced segmentation of daybreak recollecting your difference streaked in digit sway in an alphabet scripted and sent that your scribe has subscribed to my memories

In daily doses of refraction of heat through glass-dermis bending me in grace, holding in firmness this bond knowing it is not transient; it is not flittering on a light beam in star-dusted brushes off the shoulder of God’s accidental collisions, but somewhere deeper in the construction 

This is a blueprint of pheromones coming home cresting in waves of olfactory recognition with synapses celebrating the leaps of impossible canyons of cerebellum membranes connecting across the inherent bonding of a pairing of humans like indigo instructions of an adjoining

I feel a covenant in daily reaffirmed choice, to choose.  I will be the boat and you will be the oars steady, faithful and loyal to you like a vessel to carry our dreams across horizons and kiss sunsets goodnight into peaceful slumbers

Fervent, emotive, the blue blinking butterfly with blue eyes rowing moving us in zest filling these sails with zeal to maneuver pelagic pathways balanced in the bow.  We are connected in a window pane, two hemispheres of a cerebrum in counter weights of memory.  I feel the warmth of your imprint and the blueprint of God’s design.  I say without reservation that

I love you.  I love you in a profound way beyond the sway of the zephyr or the maelstrom the horizon’s change in colors as the prism rotates the spectrum of these hours. I love you for who you are and are for me.  I love you.

I wrote the poem ready and wanting.

500

The next morning I picked up Penelope.  We came back to our house and watched Saturday morning cartoons on Boomerang.  We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch.  Penelope and I were about to head out to the neighborhood pool.  Elyse’s rebel ringtone sounded on my phone. 

Elyse told me she was late.  The night before Elyse took a home pregnancy test and it was positive.  She was going to the doctor to get a blood test later in the day for us to find out for sure.  Penelope and I never went swimming.