GATHERING ROSES (published by Chipmunkapublishing, 2007)
By Ellen Weisberg
Brief Synopsis: Gathering Roses, influenced by real life events, was written a number of years ago. Yet there still is relevance to the fast-paced, Internet-driven world of today, where communication is facilitated but intimacy diminished, and where conflict is promoted without resolution.
Youtube link to audiobook of Chapter 2 and the rest of the book!
Chapter 2
It is a long road that has no turning
Irish Proverb
Lori found Nick sitting quietly at the mixing board with an indecipherable expression on his face that could be interpreted as anything from mild boredom to fierce pensiveness. He briefly looked up at her. He quietly got up out of his seat and motioned for her to take his place.
“So you with anyone?” he asked a few moments after she sat down. Lori’s hand was nervously perched over a microphone pot on the mixing board.
“Hmmm?”
“I asked if you were with anyone,” he said, slowly. His midnight blue eyes locked with hers.
She looked down at the lever and was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” she said, hesitantly.
“Yeah? What’s his name?”
“Paul.”
“Paul who?” he asked.
“Why do you want to know his last name? It’s not like you’ll know who he is.”
“Just tell me,” he said, a rough edge to his voice.
“Polansky.”
“Paul? Paul Polansky? Hee, hee!” Nick moved his seat back a few inches and sat with his arms crossed over his chest, smirking at her.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
He grinned down at his folded arms and shook his head. “Nah, nothin’. I just feel like laughin’.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, thoughts of Paul filling her head and plaguing her with mind-numbing ambivalence. Over time, she had found herself in the transitory, undistinguished company of many Pauls. And her insufferable frustration with them would inevitably cause her to flee from each one of them, their predictability, and their lack of complication. With her current Paul, she knew it was only a matter of time before she did the same. He wanted her, which meant only one thing: that he wasn’t in his right mind.
“You look so cute right now, over there,” Nick said. “Too bad you’re spoken for.”
Her face grew warm. She wasn’t expecting the advance. Yet she felt anything but drawn to him. From the image of his long, kinky hair being set free from the worn rubber band that held it together, to the strange, grunge-like clothing he wore with all the mismatched, loud colors and stiff, uncomfortable-looking fabric, to the stray nose hairs peeking out from underneath his nostrils as he peered over her at the mixing board, she actually wondered if there was a girl on the planet that would find him attractive.
She felt badly for him.
“It’s too bad we didn’t meet sooner,” he said. “If we did, we’d be screwing like bunnies.”
Her shift ended late that Sunday evening. She swung the strap of her purse over her shoulder and started to walk out of the control room door.
“So do you wanna exchange e-mail addresses?” Nick cheerily asked her as she approached the threshold. “I got lots of jokes that I can send you.”
“Uh, sure,” she said, caught off-guard. She reached into her purse and ripped off a piece of a wrinkled envelope.
“Okay,” he said. He pressed the scrap of paper against the wall behind him and scribbled away on it. “Now I better hear from you.”
He had forwarded gags and riddles to her in rapid succession, as promised, and continued sending her scattered messages as the week wore on. Lori was intrigued by his sudden sustained attention, as well as pleasantly surprised that someone as strikingly different from her as Nick was actually reaching out to her. His look and demeanor reminded her of the boys in high school that she would always shy away from for fear that they would hit her with some spiteful, scathing remark as she passed by. These were the same boys that she would never see in her honors English or Social Studies classes, that she would never play chess or Backgammon with after school hours, and that she would never hear blowing into a tuba or French horn in the band wing. These were instead the boys that she would curiously stare down at from the bus window as it passed by the front stone wall of her high school, which was a notorious breeding ground for mind-altering hallucinogenics and drug dealers.
It was the following Sunday.
“So what happened to the jokes you were sending me?” Lori leaned over the mixing board and stared down at the word “audition” printed underneath a gain pot. Some of the ink was missing, making it instead read “auditio.” She thought it made the word look foreign, like Spanish or Italian. “The e-mails just … stopped.”
“I dunno.” Nick shrugged. “Haven’t gotten any good ones lately to send, I guess.” His voice was monotone and his eyes were averted toward an article in a trade magazine that he had lifted off of a shelf in the control room.
“Oh,” Lori said. “Well … I was enjoying reading them.”
He continued perusing the magazine and said nothing. Lori slowly turned her body away from him and decided to try to shift her focus to the VU meters to make sure they were not pinning. She watched Nick curiously out of the corner of her eye, wondering what could be so interesting to him as to completely shut her out.
“What are you reading?” she asked, quietly.
He was silent.
“Nick?” She thought maybe he did not hear her. “Nick?” she said, loudly enough to give herself a jolt.
He remained motionless, merely flipping a page and continuing to read. “What?” he finally asked slowly, distractedly. He looked up at a small digital clock that sat above Lori’s head and said, “Hey, are you ready for the break? It’s coming up in a minute.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lori said, trying to force her attention away from him. “I think so.” She pushed some buttons on a nearby computer and lined up a series of commercials for firing.
An hour or so of silence passed by, during which Nick continued to read, bewitched by the contents of his magazine. Almost unbearable stretches of boredom plagued Lori in between commercial breaks. She didn’t understand why she found herself suddenly in the midst of a deep freeze with him, when he had otherwise been so warm and amicable just days earlier.
He slowly rolled his magazine into a mock telescope and started peering through it at her. “It’s too bad you’re taken,” he said, lowering the magazine to his lap. He sat upright in his chair.
“And what if I wasn’t taken?” she asked. She was grateful that at long last she was getting his undivided attention. “I’d just be one of many,” she said teasingly. “I’d be lost in that endless line-up of girls you keep telling me you meet on Internet chat rooms.”
“Yeah, but I’d put you right up there above ‘em all,” he said, smirking. “There’s something about you, Lori.”
Her curiosity about him was- to her surprise- beginning to grow. He was unusually confident for someone with his kind of rough and tumbled looks, subtly marred as they were by a small circle of shallow pockmarks on his right cheek and a slightly bulbous nose diminishing the size of his football-shaped eyes. Confident, and curiously untamable. What kind of spell, she wondered, was needed to make the cow chewing its cud stop simultaneously eyeing another patch of grass?
“We should do cyber sex sometime,” he said, making a ring of keys dance around his forefinger. “E-mail me.”
From:
Subject: Horse fetish
To:
I’m in a weird, suspicious, introspective, and potentially psychotic mood. Hopefully I can turn this into something productive, but at this point I’m pessimistic.
I spent most of this afternoon reading the “Tao Te Ching” and searching for some sort of inner meaning, and I must admit that I’m making headway. But despite what I’ve read like “The sage does not act, therefore, he does not fail; he does not grasp, therefore he does not lose,” I still feel like acting and grasping and basically punching someone in the face. I guess I’m just not cut out to be a “sage,” but if I play my cards right I’m hoping that I can still get a government job eventually. Do ALL government positions require a drug test?
I’ve got two separate resumes done now. One is geared toward my Human Services experience, and the other highlights my B.A. in English and semi-extensive writing credentials (basically, my “writing credentials” are my nomination for the university poetry prize when I was in school). I picked up my resumes and a bunch of other job-hunting materials last Friday. So far, the only significant place I’ve sent my resumes is the upper shelf in my kitchen cabinet, so I don’t accidentally spill beer and Jack Daniels all over them.
Rutherford
Lori had met Rutherford at Brimstone Park, a tiny stretch of softwood hemlock and pine trees and white cedar garden benches typical of the colonial southern New Hampshire village they both grew up in. They had started talking to one another on a day when Lori was hopping along a nearby tidal creek, Swallowtail gazing, and Rutherford was resting on a large granite stone reading gangster and serial killer collectible cards.
Occasionally, she would find a paperback book written about some occult-related topic that Rutherford would leave for her in her family’s mailbox. He would set up camp with her in reputedly haunted burial grounds, and trudge with her through lonesome kettlehole bogs on the outskirts of town while reading the latest in his archeological digs of paranormal research and expert attempts at unraveling the mysteries of the supernatural. Rutherford seemed to be more impassioned over death than he was over the very life he was living, exhaustively examining the general futility of life at its mundane worst, and the liberation of death at its finite best. He spoke to Lori’s bitter, ruthlessly reflective and increasingly pessimistic soul, and over time became the bitter, ruthlessly reflective and pessimistic mate her soul cried out for.
Despite the fact that Rutherford was only 22 years old, he predicted that he would eventually have to import a mail-order bride from overseas because he would never find an English-speaking woman who could tolerate him well enough to spend her life with him. In the meantime, he was considering providing his sperm to his friend Jill, a 25 year-old bisexual former exotic dancer and Wiccan who was contemplating conceiving a child out of wedlock that she planned on raising with her lesbian partner.
From:
Subject: Creampuff
To:
Wherefore art thee? It seems that every time I change e-mail addresses nobody wants to write to me for weeks. So I’m back to my original address. May the Devil take me for a liar!
I’m giddy right now, because I think I have another hot date coming up with a local townie girlie this weekend. My friend Joe’s new girlfriend hooked me up with this girl named Karla who just broke up with some guy like three months ago. She’s, how shall we say, hot to trot. All night while we were hanging out, Joe kept nudging me in the side and winking, as if to say “you’re in, you lucky bastard!” He and his girlfriend left around midnight, and I told Karla that she could “stick around” for a while if she wanted. By 12:02 I had her legs in the air, baby! I still can’t believe how fast that happened. This chick, unfortunately though, is a piece of trash. She works at McDonalds. She’s not in upper management, either. She’s the one who hands you your Happy Meal at the drive-through. And she lives in a trailer.
Rutherford
(stay tuned for chapter 3…)
Here is a link to a real-life illustration of a challenging relationship dynamic, entitled “Reeling.”
And here are some other interesting and pertinent links:
DeMars Coaching – YouTube (DeMars Coaching)
Surviving Narcissism – YouTube (Dr. Les Carter)
NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone – YouTube (NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone)
Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc – YouTube (Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc)
DoctorRamani – YouTube (DoctorRamani)
Dr. Todd Grande – YouTube (Dr. Todd Grande)
Crappy Childhood Fairy – YouTube (Anna Runkle- Crappy Childhood Fairy)
Donielle Jolie Yanez – YouTube (Donielle Jolie Yanez)