PART 2 - Thelma's Daughter Reads Poetry

Thelma walked solemnly up the stone steps leading to the grey, vine covered building that looked like a castle. Inside, people swarmed about, chatting, filling glasses of wine for each other. Thelma stopped a moment, until she spotted Joanna deep in conversation with a man who reminded her of Humpty Dumpty. Hell, she said to herself, I do know poetry after all. Joanna turned and waved, excusing herself from the fat man.

"Oh, mother, I'm so glad you came. I know this isn't your sort of thing, but I'm very glad you're here." Joanna took her mother by the arm and planted her in a seat right at the front. Too bad, Thelma thought, I can't take a snooze without everybody noticing.

Soon everyone was seated, the readers in a semi-circle in front of the small audience. Joanna sat next to the fat man, then there was a stern looking woman of fifty, and a pink looking young man. Thelma glanced down at her black shoes, her best, and suddenly felt that she needed more Jack Daniel's, preferably through a straw.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to this extraordinary event. We have here two eminent practitioners of the poetic art, Mark Pincus and Sandra Godzinski, and two wonderful critics of their work, Joanna Ryan and Larry Orgel. Mark and Sandra will read from their work, and Joanna and Larry will also read, then comment."

The fat man began to read, in a deep, rumbling voice, a voice that Thelma associated with high-toned radio programs.

"The wake of the sea, in its blue wash, oh god, in its blue waves of --"

Thelma looked down at her shoe. Shit - there was a piece of scotch tape where the buckle had broken. She reached down to pull off the tape, very genteelly, she thought, when her eyes rose to that of the stern looking woman. They were fixed on her. Thelma frowned, hoping her deep interest in the poetry would register in her brow.

"The deep anguish of my soul, when that sea washed over me--" How did Aegean Queen do in the fifth, she wondered. Aegean Queen was out of Royal Dynasty, that should be good for something, Rafael Pedroza was up - she had dreamt that one, dreamt that she would win.

"Royal, imperial was that moment, there on the shore--" Royal Donna, oh goddamn it, that's the one, Thelma thought. It'll be Royal Donna for sure. Why didn't I bet on her?

The reading went on. The fat man sat down, beads of perspiration on his face. He wiped himself with a big white handkerchief. The pink young man stood up. Thelma must have drifted off.

"’Love's pinnace,’" he pronounced it ‘penis,’ "will keep our bark afloat - now that line has tremendous significance as far as the sexual symbolization of the poem."

Did I hear "penis?" Thelma wondered with a start. She looked directly into the eyes of the fat poet, who was looking at her. He smiled and unbuttoned the lowest button on his bulging grey vest.

What would happen if I started yelling "penis, penis, penis?" Thelma wondered. He smiled at her again. He could read her mind! He was a poet, and he could read her mind.

Finally it was Joanna's turn. She stood up and started speaking, in that low, wistful voice of hers. What a beautiful girl, Thelma thought, as she looked at the solemn blonde, long hair tied in a velvet ribbon and hanging down her back, in her austere little T-shirt and denim skirt. But she was afraid to listen. It had always been that way. Her daughter was so lovely to her, but so alien, that she could never bear to listen to her even when she was the fairy princess in the school play or the lead singer in the high school chorus. She was the lead in everything, Thelma mused, and every lead meant loss.

Joanna held her arm as they walked out through the front hall. "I'm so glad you came, mother. Did you enjoy it at all?"

"It was fine, honey, just fine." Thelma said and patted her arm. "I don't know how you do it, really."

"Do what?"

"Do what you do, I mean, say all those things. You know so much."

As Joanna helped Thelma into the Plymouth, she said, "Listen, mother, I've been trying to tell you--"

"What honey?"

"I've been trying to tell you about Clive. We're engaged. I hope you won't be upset, you know, that I didn't tell you before."

Thelma sat uncertainly at the steering wheel. "Before when?"

Tune in tomorrow for Part 3

"'Diving Duck Blues'" - Part 1 - Thelma's Daughter

A. R. Taylor is an award-winning playwright, essayist, and writer of fiction. We're serializing one of Anne's stories, originally published in the Berkeley Insider, all this week. "'The Diving Duck Blues'" involves the agony a mother feels at the great distance between herself and her daughter. Knowing full well that she has failed her child, Thelma still tries to understand her world, and to some extent, fit in. Ultimately, she can't, but she can still love her.

"'Diving Duck Blues'"

“If the river were whiskey, babe,
and I was a diving duck,
I'd dive on that bottom,
Baby - and I'd never come up.”
Sleepy John Estes

Thelma Ryan looked down at the red and white racing ticket and then tore it up. Outside Rafe and Ginny were talking on the swing. They were happy - they had had two winners and an exacta. Thelma's luck had been bad lately, probably because the moon was in Scorpio, she thought, as she looked down at the elaborately printed invitation perched next to the African violets over the sink.

"An Evening of Poetic License." She stared at it, gloomily.
"Come on out here, Thelma," Rafe yelled, "We're doing the Pick Six."

Thelma took a sip from a glass of scotch she had nearby, and sat down at the kitchen table. She held the invitation in her hand, wondering how she could possibly go to this event, not even really sure what the event was. Someone was reading poetry, and her daughter would be there, probably be in charge or something like that. She took another sip of scotch. Thelma and her husband, Frank, had been sipping whiskey for thirty years, maintaining, as it were, a fairly constant level of happiness. How much did her daughter know about her drinking, Thelma wondered.

"Ginny likes Prince Hardcastle in the eighth, Thelma," Rafe yelled again. Rafe was a handsome black man, about sixty, with very few teeth. Thelma and Ginny met him at Golden Gate Fields when he gave them a seventy-to-one shot that came in. Since they had had no big win in eight months, this made for a serious friendship.

"It's 'Slugfest,' I'm telling you," she yelled back. "The crap it is," Ginny yelled again. Ginny was a woman of few words, vivid dress, and intense dreams. Thelma wandered out to the swing and sat next to Rafe, who was completely absorbed in the racing form. It was a cool, sweet smelling day, the kind that made Thelma glad her fifty-two years had been spent in northern California.

"I don't know what to do," Thelma muttered. "Who does, Honey?" Ginny laughed.

She handed the thick white note to Ginny, who looked at it suspiciously, turning it around several times. "What the hell is it?"

Thelma suddenly felt too close to the edge of her drinking to explain, but then she focused her eyes on a dirty, almost mashed tennis ball lying in the grass. Joanna played tennis. She had given her daughter her first tennis racket, even though the steady "pock, plop" of the game put Thelma to sleep.

"Somebody's reading poetry, maybe a poet or somebody, or people like Joanna."

"Does Joanna write poetry?"

"I think she just reads it, or I don't--" Thelma drifted off. She did not quite know what Joanna did, studied a lot, that she knew, but about what, why and all, she just could not figure out. Some have their nose in a book, others in a bottle, she thought, not without a hint of laughter.

Thelma's drinking career had been long and steady. It had risen to a crescendo when her husband Frank died, and had now tapered off to about a fifth a day. She and Frank had been drinking buddies and had always managed to get each other home. Thelma never felt any real pressure to stop, although the night she sent the Plymouth into a ditch, called the tow truck, arrived home, whispering to the driver to keep quiet because Joanna was asleep, and managed to have not a single memory of the entire event (Frank told her about it)- all of this made her feel that she should cut down, if only a bit.

Thelma thought of herself as an artist of something she called the "buzz maintain." Whiskey just kept that little hum going that made the world spin at a slightly lower speed.

And she knew exactly where the line was that separated mere fuzziness and generalized good will from complete screaming wildness and blackout. Once in a while she went over that edge just to scare herself.

She wondered now if Joanna had known that at all those school plays, those ghastly talent shows, those award nights when the fat Spanish teacher would begin with "Buenas noches, everybody," Thelma was bombed. Unfortunately Joanna was sure to walk away with two or three awards, invariably presented at the end of the evening, after a horrendously painful list of Tommy's and Joey's and Kimberley's and Tara's, all of whose parents were dutifully present and sober, at least according to Thelma's glazed appraisal of the situation.

"At least I was there," she said out loud.

"Where?" Ginny muttered, now circling choices on her card.

"That 'Easy Easy' in the fourth, I've lost so much friggin' money on that asshole, he should be runnin' claiming races at the County Fair," Rafe declared. "Strictly glue factory material."

"Why do you bet him all the time, then, genius?” Ginny said as she inhaled her cigarette dramatically,

"I don't know, I keep thinkin', this time, baby, this time, but then I know that he'll be standin' in the gate, lookin' around sayin' 'A race, what race, I just want to stand here and fart.'"

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2.