Standing on my head

Leaving Nordstrom’s with a tie I bumped into Milly handing out candies on the main floor as part of some promotion. "Hi, Greg," she said. What a memory, I thought. We had a single class together two years ago and she remembers my name. "Hi, Milly," I said, glancing at her name tag.

She said come back in a half hour when she gets off work and we'll do something. That turned out to be have sex in her apartment. Afterwards, we lounged around on her bed and looked at old pictures. Now and then I'd glance over at her clock radio, wondering when I'd be able to leave politely enough to retain chances of more sex at a later date. Because Milly was not bad. I liked the lines on the soles of her feet and palms of her hand and the way she smelled.

She talked a lot, which is normally a drawback, but she told interesting stories so it was not so bad. She also had a great body. She was on the track team. She told me about running around the campus one night, a guy jumped out of the trees and started chasing her. "I just out ran him," she said.

She passed me a small, square photo, the old sepia kind with the frilly border, of a short little black woman and a tall white guy. "My grandparents," she said. "Grandpa was from Sweden."

"My grandmother was half Swedish," I said.

"Then I'm more Swedish than you are. But I'm only a half-orphan," Milly said. She told me her father, who had been an oncologist, returned from the dead late one night to visit her. She was alone at her desk studying and felt something cold and smelled his cologne behind her. I expected her to say something about some ghostly reunion. "No way did I turn around," she said. "I was afraid to see him all dead."

She asked what I remembered about my parents. At least she wasn't cooking. I planned to tell her a story, then get dressed and say I had to get to work.

"Because I was so young when they died, I have only one memory of my father and none of my mother, and the memory of my father is a memory of a memory of a memory, polished smoothly because I used to think about it over and over when I was little, falling asleep. He was teaching me to stand on my head. There was a Christmas tree and presents. You know how you stand on your head?"

She nodded.

"He touched his head to the grey carpet, placed his hands on the floor, braced his knees on his elbows and after he’d steadied himself slowly raised his legs until they were vertical. 'Now you try it,' he must have said. He said something, I don’t remember what because I have a bad memory for sound in general; my memory is a silent place. He said something and I touched my head to the floor and he touched me, helping me into position. The carpet smelled dusty. Then he let go and I fell down and he caught me. We tried this several times before giving up."

It occurred to me that I was going into too much detail with this story, but Milly looked interested. Sentiment was not always easy for me to fake, it was hard to achieve the proper balance.

"One evening at my uncle’s home, I remembered all this and thought 'why not,' and climbed off the bed and tried to stand on my head. The floor was wooden, oak, but I didn’t use a pillow or folded up towel or anything. I placed my head onto the hard floor and propped my knees onto my elbows and tottered and fell. It all hurt – the spot where the top of my skull touched the floor, the falling over – but I had by that time already inured myself to most pain and I continued kneeling and falling and trying again, until I could stand on my head. When I could, I held the position until I felt faint from all the blood rushing down to my head. Then I finally got up and sat on the bed."

"It was only then that I noticed my uncle standing silently in the dark doorway, watching me. He understood what I was doing. He understood that I felt my father helping me back up every time I fell over. Then he went back downstairs to watch the news."

Milly jumped out of bed and stood on her head. Just like that, one fluid movement. She looked as good upside-down as she did rightside-up. There was a window open and it was getting dark out so it was cool in the room and when I got real close to her I could feel the layer of warm air around her body.

I admired her for a while from that position.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"Several things at once," I said.

"You forgot how to stand on your head, didn't you," she said.

"Uh huh. I haven't done it since then. I don't know why."

"Here, let me help you," she said, and she did.

Posted by Mig at October 22, 2003 09:41 AM