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perch (purch), n. – a measure of volume for stone,
about 24 cubic feet: 16 1/2 feet long, 18 inches wide,
and a foot high.
My myth begins with perch of stone. I tell you this so when I admit that I've been throwing
rocks, making holes, shaved seventeen inches off a solid length of perch because no promises were made
and I have to break something, you'll understand just how much stone I've tossed, how much building
I have sabotaged.
I want to make one thing clear. Those rocks are mine. I broke bones digging them from ground.
Fragile metacarpals that met resistance. I ruined muscles hauling granite from one defective certainty
to the next. I don't regret the labor. Bodies heal. A little crooked at the fractures but I don't
mind. Children ask about my bent fingers and I make up stories. Say that I've been marked by gods
and that some day soon the gods will seek me out and recognize me by my hands.
I know nothing about masonry, nothing about construction. Once I harbored a crush on a man
who poured concrete, filling holes to make foundations for new and perfect houses. He was so mortal.
Spoke expertly on the properties of cement, but I knew that one missed step could send him falling,
and the splash would be so quiet no one would hear. I worried most on hot days, thinking how quickly
the concrete could harden, trapping him in someone else's home. But the danger lay elsewhere. Underneath
his skin. He learned his trade so well that even the viscosity of his blood clogged with sediment.
Solidified. I could do nothing to move him. He lives in San Francisco now. He is amazed by fog.
I began collecting rocks before I ever met him, though he certainly reinforced my infatuation
with all things that start out solid and stay that way. By that time, my collection was substantial,
though not yet unmanageable. I was twenty-five.
* * *
My arms are strong. Getting stronger and I'm working on my aim. I'm trying for a hole in
these rising walls. One that's large enough to walk through without crouching. But granite won't fly
straight or far, and slate is always breaking to pieces in my curveball grip. They bounce against the
mortared rock and land a foot or two away.
I landed here, in this town, with my collection of stones, nine months ago. I can't go far
without needing to rest. The pebbles stretch my pockets until the seams rip, spilling quartz and agate
onto my feet, bruising toes. I keep the large, unwieldy rocks in a three piece luggage set my mother
gave me for my twenty-sixth birthday. She thought a woman my age should have a proper set of luggage.
I traveled little then. She'd be disappointed if she saw the suitcases now, patched and ragged from
dragging. When I hit the edge of town, the handle ripped from the largest case, and I thought it was
a good idea to stop a while.
That's a lie. It was for a man that I came. And it was because of a man that the walls began
to rise. This is my worst sin: I showed him my rocks and I said, "See. These are for you."
And he began to build.
* * *
I was seven when my cousin Penelope gave me my first rock. She was older than me by seventeen
months and she was blonde. The beauty. Her hair fell to the middle of her back and shone like morning
sun through windows, waking me. Waking everyone. At seven, I learned about influence. Thought it
was god-given, found in the luster of hair or the length of an eyelash. My mother kept my brown hair
cropped so it would not tangle. I didn't mind. I thought I was an ugly child.
Penelope and I were scrambling through the uncut brush in the fields behind our grandmother's
house. Spring came late that year and the ground was marshy, yielding beneath our steps and filling
our shoes with mud. The weeds had grown above our heads and we pretended that we were exploring a jungle,
making it our home. Penelope led the expedition, confident her judgment would be quick if any danger
befell us. Without stopping she bent down and swept something up from the ground. Turned around and
handed it to me. It was a rock. A pebble, really. Sandstone, gray-blue and smooth.
"What's this?" I asked.
"A rock," she answered.
"A rock?"
"It's your weapon."
"I'll bang a lion on the head," I said, happy with purpose.
"No," she said. "I'll sing to him. If that doesn't make him lie down, you throw the rock
and hit him in the eye so he can't see."
She waited until I nodded before she turned and resumed the expedition.
That night, when we were pulling back the covers on the bed we shared at our grandmother's
house, she asked me, "Where's your rock?"
I looked at the dresser, where I piled everything from my pockets. A Chinese fortune teller
made from loose-leaf. A half-eaten pack of zebra-striped gum. A plastic ring that once held a monstrous
candy ruby. No rock.
"I think I lost it."
"That's too bad," she said, sliding beneath the covers.
"Where's your rock?" I retorted, ashamed that I had, once again, lost.
"I don't need a rock," she answered, pulling her hair to one side and trapping it beneath
her head on the pillow.
I climbed into bed beside her, wanting to ask but shutting off the lamp instead. "I need
a rock," I thought. "Because I am no beauty, I need a rock."
* * *
I once dated a musician who collected old typewriters, the manual ones with metal typebars
that tangle together when the typing's too fast. He said he liked the sound of them, that gravid pause
before the typebar's upswing, the gunshot crash of contact, and the echo of the bar falling back in
its place. It soothed him, he said.
He could make music out of anything: coins in a cardboard box, tupperware, a screwdriver against
an air conditioning grate. But most of the time he lay on my couch, a hand-me-down from my mother's
house. Often slept there until morning. When I asked him why he never liked to go home he said,
"Too many typewriters."
"Give some away," I suggested.
"They're heavy," he answered, picking up a cheese grater from my dish rack and playing it
with a chopstick.
"Play that song for me," I said. "The one about the girl who walks inside ropes."
He kept on with his cheese-grate rhythm. "I can't. I don't remember the words."
"Give away your typewriters."
"I can't," he repeated. "I think they will be necessary. I think I need them."
I play his tape sometimes. Sing along to choruses of songs about bulldozers, spaceships,
and Schenectady. But the song about the girl who walks inside ropes isn't recorded. I never heard
that song again. It's fair. He never heard me confess to a habit of rocks.
* * *
My lover likes it, my collection. He dragged the broken suitcases to the field behind his
house and cut through the mangled zippers with a kitchen knife.
"You've ruined my luggage," I told him. "I'll have to throw them out."
"You don't need them anymore," he replied, lifting the rocks one by one and placing them in
rows on the ground.
"I do," I said, kicking at the rows, making the smaller stones tumble.
"We'll get you another suitcase. One with wheels." He emptied the first case and moved toward
the second. I didn't help.
"You've got quite a pile here," he said, breathless as he pulled out a boulder with both hands.
"A perch."
"A what?"
"Put them all together and I have a perch of stone. It's a measurement."
He looked at the cases, then at me. "Do you have more?"
"Some."
"We'll get them later."
"What for?"
"I'll build something. Fences. A shed. Something with walls."
"For me?"
He reached around the rows and pulled me to him. Kissed me. His lips soft, like wet cement
swallowing me down.
"Sure, baby. For you."
* * *
When I was fourteen I went to teen night at the Chuck E. Cheese family restaurant with Penelope.
We smoked cigarettes that we filched from our mothers, ate pizza, and shouted at each other while Prince
and the Thompson Twins raged out of invisible speakers, distorted with too much bass. Penelope's friend
Leda was there. She was seventeen and six months pregnant. When Penelope found us talking by the Centipede
video game, she pulled me away to one of the plastic booths by the roped-off children's playroom.
"Did she feed you that bullshit story about a swan?" Penelope asked, pulling a loose cigarette
from her purse and lighting it. She scrunched her lips around the filter when she inhaled and I realized
that I smoked better than she did.
"I know lots of stories about swans," I answered, holding my hand out for the cigarette.
Her mother smoked menthols and I liked them.
"Don't believe any of them," she said, ignoring my reach.
"I'm a swan," I challenged.
"You are not."
"I will be."
"You're crazy."
"I'm kidding, Penelope."
"Whatever. Just don't hang around pregnant girls. You'll get a reputation."
We stared at each other across the table, her mother's forgotten cigarette turning to ash
in her hand. I had two rocks in my purse, chunks of pavement, really, snatched from the beat-up parking
lot on my way inside.
Duran Duran's "Rio" began blasting out of the speakers and, understanding each other's smiles,
we got up to dance.
"Hey, Pennie. Who's the freak?" A tall boy with brown hair like mine bumped into Penelope,
laughing.
I looked around to see who he was talking about and saw nothing but bodies and eyes.
"She's my cousin, asshole."
I froze. Stared at his mouth, his wide smile and teeth.
Penelope grabbed my hand and led me off the dance floor to the bathroom. Checked under the
stalls for feet before she hugged me.
"Penelope, do I dance like a freak?"
"No," she said. "You dance like a swan."
He kissed me in the parking lot while we were waiting for Penelope's mom to pick us up. His
teeth were sharp and his tongue was like a thick cut of bologna in my mouth.
"I like freaks," he said. "Give me your number."
I thought about giving him one of the rocks but they were mine.
"Was it nice," Penelope asked after we climbed into her bed and shut off the light.
"I couldn't feel his lips."
"Huh?"
"It was all spit and tongue."
"That's too bad."
"Is this something I'm going to have to get used to?"
"I think, maybe, you weren't really kissed."
"No," I agreed. "I wasn't."
* * *
That summer I started babysitting for a family with two sons, seven years apart. The father
was an engineer; the mother, a city planner. They took me to their camp in the Adirondacks every summer
to mind the children, and so I can say that in my adolescent years I was a servant. At nights during
my third summer in the mountains, after the mother and the father went to sleep, I would stretch myself
along the length of the antique Stickley couch, the weight of their eighteen year-old nephew pressing
on my jutting hip bones, my ribs. He was a lovely boy, golden and soft. But he mumbled. And in the
mornings, he would avoid my eyes, the rooms I sat in, conversation. I felt like the Adirondack sun
faded me, made me difficult to see.
Some mornings, the father would wake me and the boys before dawn. We'd dress in layers and
our sturdy hiking boots, force down a breakfast of oatmeal and toast, and drive through gray light and
mist to the base of one of the mountains that rose above 4,000 feet. As we strapped on our packs and
made a final check of supplies, the boys would each search the ground for a stone of a certain shape
and size to carry up the mountain. When I asked them why they did this, the youngest said,
"There's cairns at the top. We need to give a rock to the cairns."
"Cairns?"
"Little rock pyramids that hikers build as a sign."
"Sign of what?"
"That we were there."
"Why not just find a rock when we reach the top," I asked.
"It's not the same," he said, holding out a ragged piece of feldspar. "I'll carry this the
whole way. It means something. It's--" He looked at the stone in his palm, searching for words.
"It's the story of your climb," I suggested, bending down to find my own rock.
"Yeah." His fingers closed over the stone and he put it in his pocket. "It's proof."
On the ride home that afternoon, I pulled a rock out of my pocket and showed it to him. It
was a craggy piece of conglomerate, tiny bits of mica and quartz glinting in streaks of sunlight streaming
between the trees.
"You forgot to leave your rock at the top," he said, looking at me with rare six year-old
sympathy.
"I didn't. I found it at the top. I carried it down."
"Why?" he asked, then added, "I don't think you're supposed to do that."
"It's the story of the mountain," I replied. "It's a fair trade."
That night, long after the boys were put to bed, and shortly after a game of scrabble and
one of hearts, the mother turned to the father and said, "I'm sleepy. Come to bed."
The father turned to his nephew and said, "You should hit the hay, too. We've got a big day
tomorrow." They were planning a canoe trip across the lake.
"I'm not tired," the nephew answered. "I think I'll stay up and read a while." He grabbed
a book from a pile on the end table and settled on the couch. I could see the title. Birds of North
America. The father shrugged and held the mother's hand as they left.
The nephew stopped thumbing through the book and watched as I gathered up the glasses to bring
to the sink. I set the glasses back down and said, "This can wait until morning." He smiled and I
thought, I am not so hard to see. It was true. His gaze never left me as I pulled on my sweater, taking
my time with the buttons. He watched as I walked to the door that led outside and to the sleeping cabins,
and his smile disappeared.
"Goodnight," I offered, but he didn't answer. I closed the door behind me.
* * *
It was not something I had planned. When I threw the first rock, I wasn't thinking at all.
It was a smooth, rounded piece of sandstone. Its cool weight familiar in my hand. Then it was flying.
I watched until the sun swallowed it. It was the first I cast away.
I looked down at my perch, neatly piled and waiting for purpose. I looked at the stone walls
that my lover was building on level ground in the field behind his house. It once yielded feed corn
but had been fallow for years. Twenty-nine years of gathering stone. I looked at the walls and I knew
why.
That day I threw thirty-two rocks. Used both hands to lift the heaviest ones above my head
and heaved them. The pile of stone was barely smaller, a sliver of matted grass the only testimony
to a pillaged row. It was enough for one day. I went back into my lover's house and waited for him
to come home.
* * *
Penelope married three years ago. Cut her hair after her first child. Cut it shorter after
the second. I'm not sure if there is a connection between childbirth and length of hair, but I do know
that at the birth of her first child I no longer envied Penelope's locks. I envied her the child.
And as if cued by my migrating envy, she rid herself of that which no longer mattered, and held in her
arms that which did.
At the hospital, she gave me the baby to hold. He was sleeping. His skin was magnetic.
My blood pulled toward him. I wandered to the window turned mirror by night. Stared at my reflection
and wondered what the baby's weight would be in stone.
"Did it hurt?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter," she said, reaching out her arms to take back her son. She was ashen.
Shelled.
"Did they cut you?" I gave the baby back and my blood pressed against my skin, trying to
follow.
"I am so in love," she answered, staring at her son.
"I envy you," I confessed.
"Yes," she said. "Yes."
Penelope's husband travels for his work, selling medical supplies from one barren corner of
the country to the other. On the nights when he's gone, Penelope sits on her couch and teaches herself
how to crochet. She started with simple scarves and worked her way through afghans to sweaters. She
was working on a popcorn pattern for an afghan one night when I came to visit.
"Get a babysitter," I said. "Come out with me."
"I can't," she said, her eyes focused on the crochet needle. "I have so little time with
the boys as it is."
"They're sleeping," I countered.
"Jacob said he's going to call when he gets to the hotel. I should be here." She pulled
at the yarn and wrapped it around her index finger.
"Your mom will come over to stay with the boys and she'll tell Jacob that you're out with
me. He'll understand."
She nodded her head and counted the loops of yarn.
"We'll have martinis and flirt with college boys. It will be fun. Come out with me and be
my girlfriend."
"Look at that," she said, throwing down her needle. "I messed up this whole row!" She began
unraveling the afghan, stitch after stitch disappearing so quickly it looked like a wave dying on the
shore.
"What are you doing?"
"It's all wrong," she said. "I have to start over. She motioned to the growing pile of crimped
yarn on the floor. "You want to wind that into a ball for me?"
"I don't want to, Penelope. I want to go out."
"You should go. Have fun." She paused, looking down at her unraveling afghan, yarn the color
of sea in storm. "I'm worried about Jacob."
"Jacob? I'm sure he's fine." I reached for my coat and tried for one more persuasion.
"He's probably sitting in the hotel bar right now, knocking back a beer."
She stopped pulling at the yarn. "He probably is."
"Is that what you're worried about?"
"No," she said, picking up her needle and twisting the yarn once more around her finger.
"Give me a call next week. Jacob will be home and I'll get my mom to watch the kids. We can all go
out to dinner or something."
I nodded, kissed her, and left through the garage. I didn't call the next week. Jacob wasn't
home. He never was.
* * *
Yesterday morning I woke to find my palms scraped, one fingernail torn at the nail bed. My
lover told me he found me in the field, gathering stones in my sleep and stumbling. Said I was dragging
a boulder to the rock pile when he caught up to me and led me back to bed.
"Did I fight you?" I asked.
"No."
"Did I say anything?"
He held one of my hands and dragged his thumb lightly over the scrapes. "No."
"Nothing?"
"You were mumbling at the boulder, but you stopped when I reached you."
"What was I saying?"
He put his arms around my waist and pulled me down onto the bed, offering his shoulder as
a pillow. "I'm not really sure. Crazy talk. Dream talk. It sounded like 'What do I have? What else
do I have?' You were repeating it over and over again."
"Oh."
"You have me, you know."
"I know."
His arms tightened, pulling me over his torso and on top of him. "I think it's sweet."
"What is?"
"That you want more rocks."
I nodded and he shifted my hips down until I felt his hardness in the folds between my legs.
"We don't need any more rocks," he whispered, pressing inside me. "We have enough."
I slipped outside and ran to the field while he was making eggs. The pile of rocks I had
worked so hard to dismantle was once again a solid perch, perfectly arranged rows of sandstone, limestone,
and shale.
* * *
My myth ends with perch of stone, measurements unchanged. I left the rocks, the suitcases,
and the lover, and I am on my way to San Francisco.
I am weightless.
I want the ocean.
I want the fog.
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