"The Waitress" is a story about..........
This poem appeared as part of The Medea Project’s Birthright? At Brava Theater April 2015. Feral Woman
I am the Feral Woman. I am of the soil and the dust of bones.
I smell of blood, and metal, orange peel, sex, and grass. I hold your hand when you push through your mother, and I stand beside you as you lay her in the ground.
I am the Feral Woman. I am the one who hears you when you cry in the blankets, reach for you when your loneliness crushes you.
When he leaves
When you bleed
When you die a little, I am there.
I am the Feral Woman
Picking up the pieces of broken glass
as I help you pack a suitcase.
Finding the quarters in the sofa,
the photos stuffed inside books,
the light in your children’s faces,
the door to the
outside world,
to the inner sanctum,
to the grocery store,
to the abortion clinic,
to the mammogram results,
to the funeral of a friend,
to the kitchen,
the basement,
the train tracks,
the sweat,
the shame you worked so hard to bury.
I am Eve’s raw and righteous sister
Lusty
Truthful
Brazen
Appalled
I’ve come to rescue you from all that silences you
2.
Teddy Bear Bus
We realize he left it on the bus. There we stand on the sidewalk, both of us frozen with our own respective versions of sublime panic. This is major. He has fistfuls of tears pooling up in his eyes, trying not to cry. Me, I’m frantically strategizing and calculating. Would the MUNI office be helpful at all with this sort of thing? How long until the next bus? We have to hurry up and get home so I can call - no cell phones yet. Not even a pager. Was there even a remote friggin possibility we’d get this stuffed bear back??? And then it comes. Completely out of nowhere, in the middle of the soon to be legendary toy crisis of 1989, the internal voice, imploring like a demon… “YOU’RE A BAD MOTHER”. What??? Where does this shit come from? You have got to be kidding.
Now, In my heart of hearts I know I’m not perfect, but I do know I’m a pretty good Mom. You see in moments like these, that litany of parental transgressions comes bubbling to the surface. Like sewage. When we can’t fix the hurt we see on their little faces, suddenly we remember ALL the hurts, and WE parents, especially us mothers, especially us single mothers, well, we can be kinda hard on ourselves.
So I decide it’s a good idea, as we wait an eternity for the next bus, to reminisce about things. Like the recent complete failure of a birthday party in Golden Gate Park. As always, the budget was super tight, and so I was banking on great weather and a giant park to guarantee success. It turned out to be one of the most windy, cold miserable days in San Francisco July history. With rain. A bunch of kids couldn’t make it for one reason or another,and I remember us sitting in the park with our little cooler, this cold small group of kids and a few adults. Against all odds and the laws of physics we managed to blow up some balloons, and set up a meager little picnic. Let me tell you if Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree came back as a birthday party this would be it. It was lame. Django tried to be a good sport about it. He played ball with his friends, We had some cake I think. But for the most part the party sucked. Toward the end I remember looking over at the balloons trailing along the ground and they were all half deflated, like muffins someone had sat on.
Some hurts were definitely bigger, a different caliber. His Dad completely disappearing out of his life forever it seemed. That was one.
It’s a cliche, but we never want to see our kids hurting, and yet that’s the world we welcome them into. A world of struggles and losses, some of them tragic. It’s our job to stock their toolboxes, and make it worthwhile to be ALIVE. It’s hard not to get stuck on the bloopers periodically while heroically keeping their sippy cups half full..The journey of a lifetime.
So we’re waiting impatiently on the sidewalk, him trying not to come completely unglued, me, mentally self flagellating, which is not really much of a coping strategy it turns out. Outwardly I stay positive. We restlessly shift back and forth on our feet, pacing around the bus stop, I’m doing that desperate gaze toward the direction the bus will be coming from thing, as if by sheer will and the laser power of my eyeballs I can will the bus over the hill. Of course, it seems we’re waiting forever.
All of a sudden the 22 Fillmore crests the hill,and before we know it it’s heading our way. Thank goodness. We could see it emptying and loading passengers down the street,creeping closer, lurching slightly side to side as it navigated the road. I squinted my eyes to try and see more clearly. Something caught my eye. Oh my God1 I grabbed Django’s hand and pulled him closer to see the bus which was now about 500 feet away. Sitting in the middle of the dashboard, big and fuzzy and brown, and looking like it was driving the damn thing, a very worn for wear teddy bear with its goofy expression and weird trouser button eyes was rolling right toward us. Django and I looked at each other in complete shock and disbelief. “It’s a miracle, Mommy! It’s a miracle!”
We clamored onto the bus when the door finally opened, my boy retrieving that stuffy like it was a million dollar bank roll. And yes he HELLA hugged it. Nobody said hella then, but I’m saying it now. There’s so much I can’t fix, so much I couldn’t explain or even understand myself,wounds I couldn’t heal. They would heal in their own time. But this? This was fixed. This was healed. THIS was a hella beautiful miracle.
