t was probably built in the fifties. It has a blocky cabanaesque look; two perfectly symmetrical stories, in bright chipped turquoise, L shaped and plunked down on top of one another. Nestled in the crook of the L is a jellybean shaped pool.

Early mornings have the crispest light, flaws come clean, unlike in shadowy dusk or mirage filled afternoon, so this is my first good look around the place. I hadn't slept well in the motel bed so instead of prolonging the tossing, I got up early, put on my loose khaki shorts and a leftover ex-boyfriend's t-shirt, advertising a band of some sort, probably long since defunct, and came out to the quiet poolside. Laying on a lounge chair sipping horrid lobby coffee out of a tiny Styrofoam cup, I watch clumps of un-dissolved, cement like Coffee-Mate, worse for the wear of the Miami humidity, float around the top. The round white bobbing bodies are reminiscent perhaps of the tourists that might have floated around this pool, at this spent motel, forty years prior. It’s not seedy yet, but it’s not far.

I don’t mind much. This is not technically a vacation, even though I'll try to make the most of it. My grandmother’s house was finally sold, almost a year after her death, and I’m here to help facilitate the few loose ends of the closing. The lawyer needed someone from the estate to oversee some paperwork. Dad couldn’t be bothered, and it’s not a long trip for me from NY. So, even though four blocks back from Hallandale Beach at a moldy motel isn't exactly the lap of luxury, I can still pause to enjoy the soft lull of traffic and pretend it is the waves of the too distant to hear ocean, while waiting for an early afternoon appointment with cold and clinical lawyer. I anticipate he will watch blankly as I put pen to paper and sign away the final physical embodiment of my happiest childhood days, a gardenia scented beach bungalow, that will be bulldozed for a condominium development. I’m interrupted from my private pity party when room #12’s door squeals open and she steps out.

Maybe it is only the quality of early sun, but her whole face gleams as the door falls shut behind her, she blinks sleepy almond eyes in the glare. Her long brown hair is pillow rumpled in back. She stands quietly, more still than most children, considering the pool water from her second floor vantage point. Moments pass, then she ducks back inside.

I smile, charmed of course, kids do that, and I pick up my book expecting that’s the last of her for a while. I’m happy for the peace, grateful for the quiet. The constant noise and barrage of people that is New York City takes its barely noticeable toll, unrealized until you step away. But the doors here are old and creaky, and her slam draws my gaze back as she darts out the door.

She captures me, as she is infinitesimally watchable, containing some kind of potent power that must be the trappings of beauty, youth. I watch her quick down the corridor to the stairs, and light down each step, but at the bottom gravity hits. Each stride has weight, she's pretend playing at being someone important. Her beach towel is draped around her shoulders and trails the ground a hair, a heavy regal cape. Becoming stern faced, or at least as composed as one her age gets, she begins walking laps around the tiled edge of the pool, pausing every other step to pull her toes through the water, the practiced movement of a gymnast on a balance beam. Her left hand is clutching the towel-cape around her neck; the other is stuck out at an angle for balance. She looks the perfect picture of an Indian princess. In her mind's eye, I fancy that the pool has become a lake, alone in the wilderness. Her back is straight as an arrow her entire facial musculature ready and posed, twitching minutely in anticipation as she surveys the landscape around her, in tune to the animals, plants, and water. I can nearly see the strong straight single speckled feather that would stand out from the back of her gleaming deep brown, slightly mussed hair.

Lost in an ever-changing imaginary world she doesn’t notice when he finally comes tromping down after her. He looks rank, hair, clothes unwashed, and at least a three-day beard. At his touch her small shoulder blade seems to suck further into her back.

I can’t hear what words he says to her but they are actually less than menacing, sounding more like pleading. She is cavalier with him. Womanly, womanish, they banter back and forth. He has pulled up a lounger and balances on the edge. They lock eyes and stay that way for a moment. I know I should pull my gaze back down into my book, but I don't. Quickly, she's had enough of him. She huffs, hurls her towel on the floor. A childish and fickle move, she'd never have done it as the precocious, but mature, princess she has been playing at. She launches into the water, slips in, slips by. Under the water I take note of what'd previously been cloaked in towel, a sleek black swimsuit with a big orange bow tied around her tiny midsection. She passes back and forth, seeing how far she can hold her breath. He waits through this, scooting to the very end of the lounger, impatiently fingering the frayed fringe of the towel, his foot tap-tapping the kooldeck. He is frenetic. Then, when it's finally too much to bear he throws the faded blue towel to the ground and pounds out to the blue sedan, parked in the lot behind me, and then back up to the room. Between them there is a power and an ache, it is hard to ascribe which to whom. She is still sliding around the pool, zipping-slick, parting the water around her as she passes through, leaving tiniest ripples in her place. She cannot have seen him leave but all the tanned taut muscles displayed in her suit are noticeably less tense.

I guiltily try to pick my place back up on the page, feeling an eavesdropping voyeur. It’s a Raymond Chandler that I had brought along for the plane, a distraction. I hear her when she pops herself out of the pool with her arms in push-up maneuver. I look-up to watch water cascade out of her hair and down the curve of her back, over her black suited bottom and spindly sinewy tanned legs. The most naked part of the human body for me has always been the backs of knees. They are astonishingly bare and tender. I can’t help but follow her glistening little legs, watching her knee backs wink-wink at me as she walks her sticky wet suit riding up one side of her firm haunches. In self-consciouslessness that is native only to children she digs a couple of fingers in after her suit bottom, pulls, and swacks it back into place. I feel something darkly sexual stir in the base of my spine, where the bone curves to meet the pelvic ridge. There is a tingling energy I haven’t felt in months. I, of course, ignore this, shunting it away, not wanting to consider the repercussion of such thoughts. Her next moment is completely different, suddenly leaded, painfully self-aware.

She picks up her discarded towel, glaring disdainfully at the brass #12 on the second story, and lays it out carefully on the lounger. She lays herself out, just as carefully, starlet style, with her hair fanned out, knees up, ready to bronze the day away. Her well-studied pose is probably a direct steal from the latest Olsen Twins/Britney Spears video, but she pulls it off like Katherine Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe she’s been a student of them all. I always liked those old black and white movies when I was her age. The roles and types seemed more easily read than the contemporary grown-up movies my parents watched. The heroes and the heroines, their seductions and intrigues, were drawn out, so that they seemed cartoony by current measure. Like my Chandler novel now, the old pulp standards, always a fun easy read.

My little princess is obviously a quick study, playing all of them in one, movie stars and MTV. Fatally feminine, ultra sexy, she is only missing props--big dark glasses, and filler for her swimsuit top and she’d be unstoppable. She looks just like a high-gloss fashion rag, some picture of a tween-age girl, selling $100 an ounce perfume by being photographed poolside, but maybe five years to soon.

A glint pierces my eye. It is from a refracted sunray off of a wrist-watched hand parting the curtain of #12. It reminds me not to stare.

Minutes idle by, no noise but the pool water lapping the edge of the pool, the traffic’s lull, me turning pages, and the princess’ occasional shift in her lounger. Then he comes back down the stairs. He cleaned up a little but didn’t shave. He changed clothes and is wearing a shiny faux gold Rolex on his hairy wrist. He makes a racket coming down the stairs because he’s put on flip-flops and they accentuate every step down with their doppelganger resonance. Coaxingly at first he tries, “Ashleigh”

She flips on her stomach and turns her head away from him.

“Ashleigh?”

He is hurt that she won’t look at him. He seems caught between wanting to reach out and touch her and the paralysis caused by her scorn. He heaves his shoulders a little as he sighs. He will try a different tack.

“Okay, enough’s enough. You need to go upstairs and get dressed now. We need to get going now.”

She says nothing.

“Ashleigh!”

“Ashleigh don’t make me count to three.” He does this, his strongest “father knows best” impersonation, but then doesn’t count, stands there blinking. Then he reaches out and takes her shoulder, as if to give it a light shake, but before he can even touch her she has big theatrical tears welled up.

“Daddy. nooo.oohhoo. I don’t.” deep breathy sob “wannaanaa gooo,” accusing him of betrayal. Her big sloppy tears streak from her eyes as she flips around to pout at him - how young they learn. I don’t think I possibly could’ve had tears worked up that fast the last time I tried to cry my way out of a speeding ticket from a burly male cop.

He scoops her up, lovingly ignoring her fists as they ineffectually pummel him on the back. A motel maid who is nearby, leaning on her cart, smoking a cigarette while waiting for the rooms to clear, mumbles through an exhale a little too loudly, “spoilt brat.”

She is still sobbing as he pulls the door shut. That’s the last of them, for now.

My pool hours are soon over. Familial duty calls. After the lamentable lawyer's office I decide on a little sight seeing, to cheer up. In my uniform of baggy khakis, dirty band t-shirt, no make-up and floppy hat, it is easy to be ignored. I float through the families at the “Monkey Jungle” like I am not even there, except for the occasional suspicious eye of a bored toddler strapped to their stroller. I buy a bunch of raisins; surprisingly you’re still allowed to feed the monkeys. They have these tiny mesh baskets that hang from the overhead and surrounding cages. Deposit the raisins in the basket and the monkeys use their familiar, too-human looking digits to dexterously pull the baskets through the openings. Then they sit back on their butts around the baskets chittering and bickering and eating raisins. Young children look on, and giggle when the monkeys diddle themselves a little. It is implicitly fascinating.

When my raisins run out I decide to opt for dinner. There’s not much near the motel. I park the rental car by a recognizable national chain in a small well-lit strip-mall. I think it is a Fridays or a Houlihans. I forget what the menu said, and the waitress has already taken it away without a word.

In fact, by the time I’m driving towards Hallandale I realize aside from legalese exchanged with the lawyer, and the few perfunctories with the waitress, the only give and take conversation I’ve had was in the company of monkeys. I feeling vaguely ghost-like walking across the open air corridors of the deserted motel to my door. I suppose it’s just the nature of solitary travel, especially to a family-friendly tourist destination. In my room the unnatural human clatter of the TV, tuned to the local newscast, is too much. Someone else’s local news is always the most foreign thing on. I can’t watch. The sound is muted and I leave only the picture to populate the space.

I had meant to go for a jog on the beach after dinner. I like running in heavy wet sand, the pull of each step a comforting cleanse, you feel stronger because of it. It’s like the bittersweet success of extricating yourself from a sinking love affair, heavy plodding pull then startling freedom, repeated ad nauseam in the cloying beach sand. But looking out the window I see that it is long past dark. I don’t jog at night anymore, haven’t since last fall. After I take down my hair, wash my face, brush my teeth, and lose the khakis, I switch the TV off and open up the Chandler. I guess I’ll try bed early, I booked a seven am flight back. Plus, I've got to get up to the hassle of the rental car return.

I am sweating, heaving, running my legs, and thrashing the sheets when I wake. The Chandler book falls from the nest of covers beside me and plummets to the floor as I bolt upright. I struggle to catch breath.

In the dream I am running away. When I wake, boiling pain sears my stomach, burning inside. I find myself calling to no one to please let it burn itself out, or let me in to claw it away. It’s caustic searing wax poured over my guts. I’d die to pull the wax away even knowing it will carry my skin, my cells with it, but I can’t reach inside myself. It’s burning and I can only wait in agony for it to cool and congeal again. I have my fist balled up pressing against my stomach and I am holding my sides. Swallow hard, swallow hard, so the acrid fire of blind angry fear begins to dissipate and hurt less, I can only breathe and wait, pressing against myself, holding it together as the dream world yields my body up back to the seeming sanity of this one.

Ever since last fall my sleep has changed, this relentless dream chases me, and on the off nights, when there is no dream, I find I’ve wandered nocturnally, not realizing until I wake the next day in the arm chair instead of the bed, or with the refrigerator door left ajar, or any other number of hints. Either way, dreaming or wandering, the peace of normal sleep is gone. I fear it will never return.

I blame myself, still. It’s stupid, I know. Intellectually, I know that, but knowing is such a small fraction of experience. It’s irrational to place blame, every friend with their two-cents worth of woman’s-magazine-daytime-TV-talk-show-psychoanalysis bullshit tells me so. But, see, I’d heard all the stories, the famous ones, like the central-park-jogger; the not famous ones, like my friends Sam’s, and everything in between. I kept at it though. Even after a scare or two. It was my thing; I wasn’t going to be bullied out of it. It’d clear my mind, those late evening jogs. I alternated the three bridges that were easily accessible from my apartment, the Williamsburg, the Brooklyn, and the Manhattan. There is something so majestic about the quiet city night, when you are running over the bridge, looking down all you can see is the dark silver tipped waves of the river, and you are bounded by the two skylines. It is part testament to the greatness of human made environs, and the corporeal embodiment of the individual's lack of significance, you are alone and tiny in the face of the water below or the cities beside, either ready to swallow you whole.

One night when a group of boys on bicycles started hooting, and taunting it wasn’t out of the ordinary, just obnoxious-but-tolerable. It’s just part of being a young woman in New York, exacerbated if you happen to have donned spandex jogging pants. Hell, I’d even had an old lady on a subway platform tell me a few days before that my stylish short skirt was “too much skin, dressed like that your just asking for it.” The bike boys verbal onslaught was less articulate but just as insulting.

“Mamacita!”

“Hey baby, you lookin good tonite”

“She gotta fine ass, man ain’t she gotta fine ass?” A rhetorical question, apparently.

Ignore. And keep on keepin’ on, one Saucony in front of the other. They were just school age boys; if one of them got too close I could easily kick him off of his bike. I’ve done it before. Some yahoo was following me, so I kicked him over on his bike. He cursed me, grabbed for my ankle, but was too humiliated to keep up the chase after that. So, knowing my own propensity for action, I couldn’t get worried about a bunch of twelve-year-olds.

I’ve also always cultivated a bit of an edge, I liked to think I was tough, or tough enough, I guess. I’m slender, tall, attractive, some would say. But I’ve always chosen styles that offset that a little, play down pretty in favour of something else. Never a conscious choice, up until recently. I look back at my photos of adolescence, I was one of those punkish kids in high school that opted for heavy black eyeliner, and shoved safety pins through my upper ear cartilage. Then, as a bartender in a divey place in college I’d put on the same sort of armour. I’d slut-it-up a bit for tips’ sake, a low neckline, or ultra-low rise blue jeans, but bleached my hair out to resemble cotton candy and wore it short short, styled as Grandma would’ve said “going six ways to Sunday,” I also got a large piece I’d designed inked onto the soft white underneath side of my forearm, a big black tribal-looking tattoo. Just enough to hold the world at bay. I’d softened into adulthood some, but still fancied myself a touch of a badass.

So, when this mismatched bunch of Brooklynites with nothing to involve them on a Wednesday night started their haranguing I wasn’t alarmed, wasn’t even angry. I felt bad for them, really. One was the tubby fat-kid-type pedaling hard to keep up with his friends. Another had obviously seen nothing but his six older siblings gansta-land hammy-downs for his entire life, the set of sneaks that adorned his feet might have been the pinnacle of hip-hop fashion in ‘92, now they were “urban brown” the color of ten years accumulated sidewalk slop, not to mention two sizes too big. The leader of the motley crew was a funny one, too. I’m sure transplanted from Brooklyn to some sleepy Mid-Western burg that more resembled my own experience, he would’ve been the math geek, or chess club prez. Thin, bespectacled, orange hair and freckles, seemingly intelligent in his reserve of comment but obvious command of the other boys, I’d bank that he’d used what might have been book-smarts that lead their way to dweebdom elsewhere to opt out of lessons and co-opt this ragged bunch as his protectorate. They all whizzed around me, taunting, playful. When the leader gave the nod the heavy one said, “Fuck this bitch” and rode off down the descending slope of the bridge. I wasn’t surprised they’d given up, lost interest; it was exactly as I’d planned.

But I was surprised when I jogged to the base of the bridge and saw a headlight glint off of the wheel of a BMX, in a pile of BMXes. I was surprised to see that three of them were walking towards me. Off their bikes they actually looked much taller, much older than twelve, more like sixteen or seventeen. Maybe it wasn’t even the same boys at all. I dunno "it", as they say, “all happened so fast.” I was surprised when they ran and caught me, dragged me by my feet over the tarred ground, which ran my jogging bra up my back and tore the skin away underneath. I was, as you can imagine, startled by the first kick to the head. The following ones all came softer and softer like my head was being swallowed up in pillows. Then, I had nothing left in me for surprise. The kaleidoscopic cacophony of their faces and the lighted skyline behind them became a blurried beautiful picture, and then just a throbbing luminescence.

They dragged me to the park at the bridge’s base and behind the statue of a great man on horseback took turns raping my limp body. I don’t remember it. It only comes to me in the dream. I catch sight of their faces, grinning, demonic, pimply pubescence with peach fuzzed upper lips covered in beaded sweat and convulsing in animal spasm at the excitement and exertion of fucking me.

A bike commuter found my bloodied body later that night. I'd nothing left to hide me from the world but a pair of dingy white period stained thongs ripped and hanging around my ankles, the kind of underwear you'd never wear on a date. They'd taken all the other stuff, even my Sacounys. I guess souvenir seekers are everywhere.

I am fleeing from the bridge boys when I wake up, sticky sweaty in the hot humid Miami night. My ears are ringing with the noise of my own pounding heart. It takes time to clear enough to realize there is another pounding outside my head. I had escaped my dream, not just of my own accord, but a persistent rhythmic banging had also served to pull me from sleep to a quiet lucid night. It is the creak-bang of an aged motel headboard in the room adjacent or above. Apparently the place isn’t too seedy for a couple of lovers, or just enough for a couple of a different kind. A heavy dark voice lets out a sudden exclamation and the creaking abruptly stops.

Much later in a groggy state I hear a door open-close, but I’ve already started to slumber, and don’t give any pause to the nocturnal wandering of my fellow motel guests.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. I walk to the window, the light is streaming in a little around the curtains, a flood of gray early morning makes me blink as I part them to investigate the disturbance. The wind has changed direction some time in the night and a gardenia bush at the front window is scratching-swaying, tapping at my front window in the blustery morn.

The clock is an angry red LCD glaring 5:30 at me, so I throw my few belongings back into my suitcase and head for Miami International.

When I wake with a start again, this time on the plane, it is not from my usual dream but from something else. I dreamt I had gotten up the previous night and walked to the window to answer the tapping, and standing naked in the gardenia bushes was my little Indian princess, crying, or breathing very hard. I woke from her trying to tell me something through the window, those big almond eyes brimming with wetness and sparkling like the moon reflecting off the pool water behind her. I woke up just as she’d opened her mouth to speak. It left me with the feeling of wanting to shut my eyes and have the dream pick up just where it’d left off. What did she say? The stewardess comes, and I order a welcome scotch and soda.

Home is reached after baggage claim, cab, the gamut of airline travel that wears even the most patient. I’d thrown down my things, gone for a stint at the gym, eaten alone, worked at my computer, and I am relieved to be back at home in my own bed. I’ve got a tin of smokehouse almonds, a big blanket and I’m ready to veg, flip channels, kill time until the 11:00 news tucks me in. I’ve got the set programmed to shut itself off at 11:30, so I can let the newscaster lull be my lullaby, a trick I’d learned from grandma. I don’t even make it through a whole sitcom, though. When I do wake my face is smushed in a pile of spilt nuts that have been stickied by a leaky bit of drool. I’d really crashed hard. The TV seems extra loud, but as I come to I get the feeling once more that I’m leaving something behind in my sleep. I imagine Ashleigh’s little face at my motel window, and hear the tap tapping of an urgent tiny hand, but I don’t know if I’d been having the plane dream again or if it was just a memory from this afternoon.

It is the newscaster’s drone that breaks me back into reality. They are reporting on some asshole kiddy rapist terrorizing the eastern seaboard, they give his stats, and call his car “a late model blue-sedan,” I don’t put much stock in morbid coincidence, and thus shake away the nagging notion that both the asshole and the car bear striking resemblance to my little princess’ father-figure friend. I’m grateful nevertheless when the shot finally cuts to the plastic boyish grin of the weather guy, and then the TV does its auto click off. I’m left alone, to say my nightly bedtime prayer out loud to no one who is listening, begging for a night’s normal sleep.

But it will not be tonight. Sometime in the middle of a NYC night, my fitful imagination transports me, not into the company of my attackers, but to what must be my image of Alligator Alley, the long straight stretch of blacktop that cuts across Southern Florida. Flashes of driving are delivered in a green glow that washes over my passenger and I. My hands on the wheel are hairy to the knuckles and I am wearing a man’s gold wristwatch. Suddenly I am outside the blue sedan. Her small brown head hits me above the waist, so I shove a hairy hand against it. Each thrust forward as I enter her from behind seems to squeeze from her tiny pink lips the slightest whimper. One last violent shudder runs down my spine as I push every muscle fiber against her toy-sized frame. Her silky dark hair is caught in the corner of her mouth; she is staring back over her shoulder, eyes up at me. The ultimate push knocks her head hard against the side of the car, and it twists against her body, the metal thud accompanied by the most delicate crack. She whimpers no longer, but from what must be my own mouth I let loose a guttural grunt, which echoing across the surrounding swamp, over the sleeping Alligators, sounds like a primate’s call. To this, I wake. There is a dampness between my legs, and my heart is pounding. In a dizzy state I stare around my fourth floor apartment for a touchstone to lure me out of this fit. There is no panacea in sight, but in the darkened window I catch my own whitened face reflected back at me. I am blurred by my rising tears. I look and where I see me I see big wet almond eyes pleading back at me, Ashleigh’s face looms in my window, and she tap taps urgently away on the pane, her small pink mouth forming the words “help me.” I am seized by that which I’ve been fleeing from since October, it threatens to crush my chest as I ball onto the bed. Lost in the noise, crashing wave-like noise, that must be my own sobbing.

 

[END]

© 2004 Valerie R Feingold - Contributor's Bio