Untidy Alice

“Tidy desk, tidy mind”,

her boss once said, in a

brusk, but pointed appraisal.

Alice had held back her response

(and her girlish crocodile tears)

by pressing her tongue

to the roof of her mouth.

Only an idiot’s mind is tidy.

That same week, she’d been told

by the Human Resources lady

with the arresting red hair,

a fellow worker had complained

(seeing as her desk faced

the communal xerox machine)

that her appearance was too unkempt;

a word Alice oddly favored.

It seems her desk had begun

to take on too much personality.

It being October, she had tacked

a series of brittle red leaves 

to her partition, as well as

random magazine cut outs 

of sinister pumpkin heads 

and a scowling scarecrow

that glared defiantly out 

at the entire department. 

Alice’s true feelings were always

barely buried in the details.

Unbeknownst to her fellow employees,

Alice had a terrible secret:

her fourth floor walk-up

in the West Eighties

looked substantially worse

than her chock-a-block desk at work

ever could. That was mere child’s play.

No, Alice made her home 

in what was for all intents and purposes

 a shattered looking glass.

But seeing as no one had, nor ever would

see where and how she lived save her, 

what was the problem?

But this little dust up with management

had made her feel like she had reduced 

her entire workplace to a trailer park. 

Or, as she liked to refer to it, 

Satan’s House of Financial Worship. 

The one perk of working in such corporate digs

was her ability to comb the internet for knitting sites

on her down time and printing all the best patterns

and designs while she drained the color ink

from the IBM xerox on the company’s dime.

Truth was, whether known or not,

Alice’s home would not have passed

anyone’s muster.

She couldn’t help that, nor did she care.

She’d long grown used to it.

(Nose-blind, if you will.)

Though there was nothing overtly odiferous,

as her kitchen had been 

crammed with miscellaneous clutter for years.

An onion had less layers.

No, more accurately, her apartment

resembled the nest of an egg-bound bird,

a dilapidated lair littered

with the droppings of some ravenous beast.

For instance, when Alice found a blouse

she liked, she purchased it in every color

of a triple rainbow occasionally

seen in the skies over the Serengeti.

Alice’s mind was made for both hunting and gathering. 

The buck stopped there and no further.

She made her killings entirely for sport

and rarely made use of her retail carcasses.

Rather than mounting her game on the wall

she was content to leave it bagged and tagged

 in indistinguishable piles splayed across the floor.

How will I know

what I think

if my thoughts

aren’t piled 

around me

like a make-shift

beaver dam?

How will I remember

mother if I don’t

keep her tethered to her

favorite polka dot scarf?

Alice kept her life in place

by not allotting things

their proper place

as her belongings awaited

their chance to be used.

It never came.

Out-dated checks, old receipts,

unopened mail, back issues

of Redbook & House Beautiful

extolled their haphazard story,

if not a cautionary tale.

Make that a grim fable.

Alice’s own life story was writ

within the same disorderly debris field.

She had tried everything once.

A hundred hapless hobbies.

Tap shoes, accordion, guitar,

mime (including berets and white gloves), 

yoga books and mat, several paint sets 

(watercolors, acrylics, and oils),

Etc. piled upon etc.,

once chosen, lingered un-used, 

and never to be discarded.

She lived day by day

with the forlorn sensation

of what it was to be buried alive

amongst tangible articles

made of her own faded impulses,

even as she remained

staunchly unwilling to relinquish

the evidence of any road taken

even with a single step.

Props reduced to artless artifacts;

bric-a-brac, Hummels, saccharine figurines.

She had a weakness for porcelain angels,

cherubs, and faeries;

 decorative objects without 

the modus operandi of proper care.

Her favorite was an angel made from 

pinecones with a soda pop top for a halo

 that would have been nice on a coffee table

at Christmas. 

At least it had made it to the stable.

Alice held herself in place

by unwittingly imprisoning 

and ignoring all that she owned.

Paralyzed by minutia,

her heart generating

it’s own gravitational pull;

nothing that found it’s way 

into her magnetic mortuary 

ever left the lady’s limbo. 

She was queen

of her own underworld

and this, her careless haven.

And so,

Alice could never have a visitor.

She could never make a meal.

She could never find anything,

though there was an eastward drift 

of bags towards the door

that contained her more current items.

For instance, she always knew where 

she wedged her keys and the Binaca spray

bottle, and the Secret roll-on, and her purse

which all formed a ramshackle Jenga

the equivalent of a bad hand at gin.

There was no bed, no t.v.,

she never cooked a meal.

She showered at the local Y

as her bathroom was co-opted

by boxes of books, records,

and old VCR tapes.

Alice herself was on the heavy side.

One might be forgiven in thinking

she stored her memories

inside her bulbous posterior.

Her facial features were pleasant enough

but her hair was longish and tended to be oily

and because she refused to dye it,

a spectrum of drab gray to ever darker ends

resembled a b&w rainbow. When she piled it into

a knot atop her head, it looked 

especially mismatched.

Alice’s self worth had formed

a permanent poker-face.

If her apartment had become

a mirror, she no longer saw her

own visage in it. She was curiously care free

in her fourth floor 

walkup mausoleum.

At night, she slept like a cat

curled up on the floor 

in a corner, her own

constant companion.

Because she had been able to dodge

the building’s super for years,

nothing had been fixed or repaired

in a decade. The high ceiling’s paint

had begun to peel off resembling

the surface of a giant upside-down

jigsaw puzzle. Near the back window

a gaping wound in the ceiling had opened up

like the door to another world

in a horror film. One couldn’t look

at it and not think of a swarm

of vampire bats pouring out

from it’s dark crevasse.

Not even her.

But to Alice, she delighted in living

inside her own namesake museum. 

She, like an item she failed to curate

was among the appropriated,

the lost and found…then lost again;

belongings awaiting their chance

to belong.

Paperwork from 1979 to present day

could be found swamping the floor,

a woman gathering evidence

as tactile proof of her own existence.

Everything held the same

emotional weight,

every purposeless piece

a sedated keepsake 

in stasis.

Did she, in fact, see herself in the broken things 

which she insisted were still worthwhile?

Here, in her hovel of solitude

who was to say otherwise? 

A pale light pushed it’s way through 

her make-shift window shades 

(made of bedsheets) illuminating

an unridden exercise bike

draped with a towel

that resembled a hobo’s ragged cloak.

Who can save me from myself?

As of late she had begun to fantasize,

first about a fire that would burn

away everything she owned, then

about a flood that would sweep away

every last bit of the detritus of her existence.

She remembered an old movie she’d seen

called Inside Daisy Clover. At the end of the picture

Natalie Wood blows up her beach house by

closing all the windows and turning the oven on.

She could still see Natalie triumphantly

trotting down the beach glancing back

at the explosion blowing the life she abhorred 

to smithereens. But Alice would have

no such luck. She couldn’t bring herself

to harm her neighbors, even though most of them

had condemned her as if she were a

hunchback living illegally in the bell tower.

People in general tended to make Alice feel

less than.  Though she could easily hold her own

in any conversation, she, like an elephant,

could effortlessly remember any detail told to her.

Alice could recall crying at least twice a week

for the last two years. It didn’t take much

to bring her to tears. A sideways glance 

would suffice.

Let me be who I am.

Your judgement only

tightens my hold on things.

Alice was made of an obstinance born of tyranny.

She had been brought up by her mother and grandmother

who were themselves locked like bucks 

in a constant quarrel for domination.

Her mother had been relegated to tending

the yard and garden outside the house.

The grandmother reigned over the interior, 

particularly the kitchen where no one was allowed

to touch a pot or cook a meal.

However, Alice was expected to clean up after eating.

The garden was off limits to her.

She remembered a story about a family

who had insisted on growing their own vegetables

only to die of cancer as their garden

was in the vicinity of a local power plant

and it’s poison had leached into the soil.

To think they perished believing they

were nourishing their family.

That story resonated with Alice

as its twisted irony woke something

inside her.

The truth was so often topsy turvy

that way.

Alice knew her life was topsy turvy as well.

Now, as she sat knitting a baby’s blanket

in both pale-blue and dusky-pink yarn

for a co-worker who was expecting

they knew not which, 

atop bloated bags of fabric samples

and various un-worn sweaters,

in the fading half-light of the veiled window,

she felt like a spider weaving a web,

stitching and looping

in the tidiest of 

zen-like knots

she could muster.

Peter Valentyne

May 5th, 2019