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
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