Arabian Nights

“Is it possible, that by telling these tales,
one might indeed save one’s self?”

Scheherezade thought so—and I do, too. Although she and I need saving from very different things. Hers a physical death, and mine a spiritual one.

Jim tells me to beware of telling these stories. Be cautious, he says. Circumspect. But I don’t know how to do that when the words often unleash themselves of their own damn will. Thy will be done, Jim. You—much more spiritually evolved than I—know that.

Today I went boldly into the world. Pushed a large metal shopping cart down aisles crowded with happy people constructing their lives. We glide past each other, careful not to touch. I buy dish detergent, hot dogs, lemonade and cookies. When I get to the checkout, the cashier is not young. It’s a Sunday afternoon in July, and she ought not to be sliding groceries across a windowed scanner; ought not to be standing there in a lazy green smock with a plastic nametag upon which someone has printed in uneven letters, “Mary.” We smile. I hand Mary my debit card—and resist the urge to lean over and tell her I am not what I seem. Me in my middle-classness, my credit cards, my capris. I want to confess to Mary that I’m making things up as I go. That the young boy who rides the bottom rung of the cart in his flip flops is a gift that I don’t always know how to manage. That my house is untidy. That bills go unpaid. That during the week I teach inconsequential things with a made-up authority to people who are probably a whole lot smarter than I.

Mary hands me the receipt—proof that I have followed the rules—and smiles at me, at my son. You are a good woman, she says. I glance quickly around, convinced the good woman Mary sees is not me. How can it be me, living such a preposterous life? And yet there’s no one behind me, no one but me…

This afternoon I jumped off a diving board and into the deep end—an act of faith, throwing my body into that greedy water. It’s been too many years since I last did that, having grown cautious in my living long before it was time. These days I drive too fast and wondered, as I watched them dive, if I might welcome the silence that awaits us down there. And yet when I jump, I’m surprised at how fiercely I struggle to come back up and break the surface of the water. To see my flat-footed son’s joy at his mother’s abandon. He claps, standing wet and dripping on the steaming cement. Waiting for me to climb up the ladder and do it again.
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