The Glory of Dirt
The dirt under Lenny’s nails is an industry. The mud on her knees is a fashion. Her boss tells her if she wants to keep selling ice-cream under the umbrella at the wharf, she needs to make more of an effort with her hygiene. But Lenny’s loyal to her dirt, it’s been her only friend when she’s had none, her sibling when her sister pretended she was a houseplant. At her father’s last wedding, she found consolation in the church’s rose garden, how the topsoil clung to her taffeta. Her father cursed as he scrubbed at her dress in the cold kitchenette of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy. Recently, she has taken to throwing bags of dirt at the protesters who vulture the steps of Planned Parenthood.
Lenny quits selling ice-cream and gets a job at the local strip club. Her responsibility is to scrub down the lap-dance booths after use. The disinfectant she uses is especially astringent and eats the skin at her fingertips, after a month on the job her fingers look circumcised. She goes unnoticed at work, slipping in and out from room to room. When she scrubs the cherry vinyl of the lap-dance booths she dreams of touching guilty skin. With raw fingers it becomes challenging to throw bags of dirt at the Planned Parenthood protesters, and they mock her poor effort. A woman spits at her. A freckled family throws the bags of dirt back. A sated man kneels on his stubby knees and prays. Instead, Lenny sprays them with disinfectant. She struggles to keep the dirt beneath her nails.
In high school, Lenny would spit toilet water at the girls who called her a fungus, she would kiss the boys who called her curd-face. This often got her sent to the assistant principal’s office where she was made to sit with crossed knees and was lectured on the tenets of feminine decorum. The assistant principal was young, he wore tailored suits, he was always drinking coffee and mouth breathing on the students.
Lenny wondered what it would be like to kiss his coffee-breath with her toilet-water mouth.
Is this how the French kiss? she thought.
Years later, drinking mai-tai’s at a wedding, Lenny watched a pair of legs legato across the ballroom floor. Is this what the assistant principal meant by feminine? But where was the torso?
At the health-foods store, a young woman with blue dreads suggests Lenny soak her fingers in marigold tea. She says the triterpenes will help the skin heal faster and give them a honey glow. At home, Lenny boils the seeds and soaks her fingers in the broth. Soon after she becomes nauseous and collapses into a ball on the bathroom floor. The room begins to slide and in the bathtub’s mold-riddled caulking she sees a chorus of embryos. They kick their heels, their pastie tassels twirl. She wonders if this is punishment for harassing the pro-lifers, she wonders if being celibate makes her a hypocrite. Lenny laughs and the umbilical grout squirms between the tiles.
At six the next evening, Lenny wakes with a curious feeling. She may have a hangover, but she may also hear the cilia move in her ears, and taste the calculus hardening between her teeth, and feel her pores dilate. She can hear the automated voice of the metro station fifty blocks away, she can smell the cherry blossoms as they bloom and decay in the uncertain arrival of spring. Everything is heightened. Everything is ahum. She realizes, despite the zeal of the blue dreaded girl at the health foods store, that she hasn’t been given the smooth salve of marigold, but instead a packet of morning glory seeds. The packet reads: Morning glories thrive in a strong, well-drained soil in a sunny site with plenty of water, but they will do well almost anywhere. The seeds have a hard seed-coat and should be nicked or soaked for two hours in warm water before sowing. The vines will generally flower 6 weeks after sowing. At her door, Lenny can hear the universe clearing its throat.
Lenny ran over her father on her sixteenth birthday. After the funeral, she put her driver’s license in a jar on a shelf that overlooked his desk. The desk was covered in ungraded essays and bobbleheads of his heroes, it was mid-century modern. Lenny’s father’s third wife boarded up the room, as she did the garage where Lenny’s father had died. It became too easy to confuse the slick of oil made by Lenny’s father’s ‘63 Alfa Romeo with the unremarkable stain of blood.
In the parking lot behind Planned Parenthood, Lenny laces bags of dirt with morning glory seeds and fills them with hot water. She thinks of her youth, how she used to feed her little sister mud pies and chocolate milk puddle-water. When her sister would cry, Lenny would say, I haven’t sweated over this pile of crap all day to get your lip. In the summer, Lenny once prepared her sister boiled skunk cabbage. When her father found out, he got sore at Lenny and put her on top of the tallest bookshelf in the living room and left her there until Labour Day. Despite her crippling fear of heights, Lenny decided it was okay to be nearer to fireworks than to God.
Lenny throws the bags of dirt at the protesters. Like shrapnel, the seeds and mud explode in the gaping eyes and foaming mouths. The protesters are blind with rage. The protesters are blind with mud and seed. The protesters walk around like hens. They spit at their shoes. They take off their clothes and sit on the pavement and make origami out of their signs. In this spectacle, Lenny is unsure about what she’s done. Her heightened sense of sight is unforgiving toward the protesters’ naked bodies, and piety looks less severe when it’s sweaty.
When Lenny discovered her father in the garage, after a quarrelsome family dinner, standing over his second wife with a raised wine bottle, Lenny realized fear was no different than temperature, that it was just a measure of something always there. In her first semester of college, she was taught that behavior is “fifty percent nature and fifty percent nurture.” She ran out of money before she learned that “all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
Lenny begins wearing a cape to work. It is yellow, and she has drawn her initials on it with a blue marker. She worries that her monogram resembles a swastika and that people may confuse her for a Nazi. Or a manager at Ikea. On the other hand, the cape gives her the credibility to abate any potential conflict.
Lenny hears moaning coming from the VIP booth. When she peeks behind the curtain, she discovers the sated man with stubby knees from Planned Parenthood sitting alone, his eyes half closed, trying to catch his sweaty breath and peel himself from the vinyl. Lenny goes to help the man, but he grasps at her in desperation and yanks the cape off her shoulders. He falls to the floor where he writhes like a giant baby. When the EMTs come to carry the man away, Lenny whispers in his ear, I am a hypocrite too.
Lenny stands in the garden at Planned Parenthood and doesn’t throw bags of dirt. When the protesters high-five each other and leave for the day, she follows the man she saw at the strip club. He now pulls behind him a bottle of oxygen. The bottle has wheels. He goes to the bakery and buys French bread; he goes to the drycleaners to claim his suits. The fact that this man eats food and wears clothes unsettles Lenny. She doubts her heightened senses will be effective against mediocrity.
On the grand steps of a church, Lenny watches the man eat a stick of peperoni. The service-goers greet him as they pass on their way to the gospel. It takes him some time to finish the peperoni because the oxygen. He brings the mask to his mouth like it’s a wounded bird. The service is over and Lenny loses sight of the man in the departing congregation. She is standing across the street behind the dirty glass of a bus shelter, the busses sulk every time they kneel and she does not board.
Lenny returns to the health-foods store but the young woman with blue dreads isn’t there. Lenny is helped by a short woman with no elbows. She tells Lenny that the young woman with blue dreads left to become a stripper. You mean an exotic dancer? Lenny says. No, says the short woman with no elbows. Lenny struggles to not overly articulate her arms. She says, I didn’t know strippers were allowed to have dreads? Are exotic dancers allowed to have dreads? says the short woman with no elbows. I imagine the work hazards are the same, Lenny says. The short woman with no elbows agrees and punches the till with a mallet. Lenny leaves the store with all the morning glory seeds.
At work Lenny has the feeling she is being watched, but she isn’t allowed to peak behind the curtains to entertain her suspicions. The feeling makes her nauseous and she wonders if there’s such a thing as too much insight. She cleans the dials of the foam machine.
Lenny’s boss calls her into his office. His office is the DJ booth. He asks her what she has one differently to make her skin glow, to make her hair bounce? Her boss wears a suit jacket, and beneath that a tie, and beneath that a t-shirt, but she knows the skin beneath is as marbled as a bank lobby. She can see the blush of the capillaries. She can see the tandem play of the heart. She can see the white knuckles of his spine. She can’t smell her own breath.
Lenny shrugs and tells her boss she keeps rigorous extracurriculars. Her boss nods. He tells her that her impeccable hygiene is off-putting to the clientele. Lenny looks at the immaculate bed of her fingernails. She understands it’s for the better.
On the way out she thinks she sees the man with the oxygen tank standing near the entrance, but it is the woman with blue dreads holding a wounded bird. Where did you get that from? Lenny asks, and the woman with blue dreads says it just flew into the window. Not the bird, Lenny says. The disinfectant.
Lenny follows the man with the oxygen tank to a movie theatre, but he doesn’t go in, he chats with a boy changing the names on the marquee. He hands the boy letters from a bucket. At a water park in the tenderloin, he hands out socks and bars of soap. The man moves as if he’s being watched, but as though he’s unsure by what.
The man goes to a charcuterie in Little Italy and orders thirty-one sticks of peperoni. At the mortadella counter the man confronts Lenny tugging her by the elbow. Up close, she can see the fovea in his eyes, she can smell the pepsin in his breath. She can feel the weight of the man’s childhood lean into her skin. Lenny snaps her arm free and runs from the store. She wishes her senses had no height at all.
Lenny remembers the first time she was called pretty, and the first time she realized she wasn’t. Her father had taken her for ice-cream under the umbrella at the wharf, he took her for a drive in the country. Afterward, he said the dirt under her nails was an industry. The mud on her knees was a fashion.
Lenny plants the remaining morning glory seeds in pots with well-drained soil. She can already see the shoots blooming, how, in time, she knows, they will leave her. She goes to put a pot on a well-lit windowsill when she hears heavy breathing at her front door. She waits for a knock, but the breathing grows louder. She is startled but not surprised to see the man with the oxygen tank at her doorstep. He is out of breath and fumbling with his mask. He asks with an unsteady anger why she has been following him? But Lenny is unsure how to respond. The man’s eyes are suffocating. My life! the man says. My life! he says twelve more times. The man pushes past Lenny and into her apartment, he collapses on the couch.
Lenny is reminded of the time she and her sister turned the living room couch into an ambulance. The Cabbage Patch family was driving north on the interstate when they crashed into a ravine. There were no survivors. Lenny asks the man how he knows where she lives? The man answers in short gasps. Her address is on all the bags that she throws at the protesters.
I’m sorry, Lenny says. For throwing dirt? the man says, Or for following me? One or the other, Lenny says. But not both? the man says. It’s just, you’ve barged into my home and commandeered my couch, Lenny says, If it were both we’d be uneven in our trespasses. Don’t be afraid, the man says. I’m not, Lenny says, trying to cross her arms whilst still holding the pot of seeded soil. The man looks different from when she found him on the strip club floor a lump of greasy cells quivering like Jell-O, drooling from his organelles, spirited only in the blebbing of his boggy membranes. There’s nothing lyrical about loneliness at the molecular level.
The man explains to Lenny that he used to emancipate dogs. I didn’t know dogs were in bondage? Lenny says. Listen, the man says. It’s an unhappy existence. Oh, man, he coughs into his mask. When I was a boy, he says, I would free the family pups, so many times that my mother stopped collecting them from the pound. All through high school, I spent most of my time walking around neighborhoods cutting leashes and opening gates. I’d been arrested a few times. I did a bad stint in juvey for freeing a seeing-eye dog.
I did a stint in juvenile detention once, Lenny says, But it was on top of a bookshelf. The man removes his mask and raises his eyebrows and says, I was locked in a cupboard once, and only the spirit could release me. I released my father by the wheels of the family car, Lenny says. I can see better in the dark than I can in the light, the man says. I can see beyond darkness and light, Lenny says. I can feel the suffering in all living things, the man says. I can feel the impulse in all living things, Lenny says.
Lenny and the man regard one another in silence. Posed on the edge of the couch, surrounded by so many flowerless pots of soil, the man almost looks proliferated. Lenny looks out the open front door and into the dim hall light.
The man clears his throat and says, I want to return to you the favor of saving my life. But Lenny doesn’t think she’s saved anyone’s life. It was the paramedics who resuscitated the man from the brink. It was her father’s wife who dialed 911. It was her sister who fetched the Cabbage Patch Kids from the creek. Lenny says, People like you and me can’t save anyone. The man shakes his head and says, I don’t believe you. You believe me more than your mother, Lenny says. This may be true, the man says.
At her sister’s first wedding, Lenny was attacked by doves released from a wicker basket. The kitchenette of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy was as cold as it was in her youth. Under the sink Lenny thought she’d glimpsed forgiveness, but it was just another bar of soap.
Out the window the sky has opened into evening like a ripe plum. It’s Lenny’s favorite time of day. The hour when darkness stumbles beneath its new weight.
I want to wake up every morning with a light, Lenny says, Or what feels like a light, warm and tidal, pulsing from my body where I normally get nauseous, in fact it moves like nausea, but instead of vomiting, my heart dilates and my carotid artery blasts blood to my head and my cheeks feel like they’re going to kindle, but with an elation and glee so frenzied that suffering of any kind doesn’t stand a chance. And this is all happening because I’ve discovered something so singular, so exceptional that it transcends my corporal body, my life as a human being, it transcends history, religion, the sciences, it even transcends time, and when I look at the clock, to ascertain how long the feeling has been holding me on its tongue, it offers me nothing, and I begin to quietly plead for the feeling to swallow me, and make me tidal, so I can begin my own journey as pulsing light in someone else’s stomach.
In the near dark Lenny can’t see the man’s face. She can’t tell if he’s crying or praying. You remind me I’m alive, the man says. Lenny gestures with the pot of soil. I suspect you never forget that you’re not dead, Lenny says. The man nods and coughs dangerously. Lenny already knows next week she’ll see the man at Planned Parenthood, and she already knows she’ll throw bags of dirt at him. And also, she won’t. Also, she’ll next see him six weeks from now, when he knocks on her door to return to her the pot of morning glories in full bloom, a single word on their violet mouths.