High (Short Story)

 

High

I was high during my sister and her family’s five-week visit.  Before she arrived, I was a nervous wreck about how to handle it. 

Out of desperation, I visited the local marijuana dispensary and asked the clerk for help. The middle-aged woman touted the cranberry-flavored spacey and relaxed Dutch Treat strain of pot with a 1:1 CBD and THC ratio, as the gummy I needed to take.  She said one gummy was equivalent to drinking four glasses of wine. I could hardly handle one glass of wine, and I’d never done pot before, but she convinced me to buy the drug after touting it as her favorite calming medicine. Twenty minutes after I left the dispensary, I was thrilled the sky twinkled in streaks of diamonds after I bit a sliver of the gummy.

I learned later that the Dutch Treat strain had the rare terpene, terpinolene, with sedating, uplifting, creative, and energetic effects. My next-door neighbor, a purist and daily marijuana smoker, who worked in the pot industry in North California, where I lived, said that new studies of terpenes were now focused on strains geared towards healing or alleviating symptoms for different diseases, which shifted the focus of marijuana industry into more niche markets, creating more confusion for consumers who were at a loss as to basic dosage.

Under the influence of drugs, I ran around with my sister, her husband, and her daughter. I lifted my arms and imagined I was a seagull, soaring gracefully off the swirling cold pond waters of the Pacific Ocean during high tide on Clam Beach;  I sang my favorite 70s R&B tunes, which played loudly on the Pandora app on my I-phone while I ran down the rocky ridge hikes of the redwood forest behind my apartment; I roller skated at full speed for three hours at the rink in Blue Lake; and I danced nonstop and with no reserve, at the reggae, folk, and hip-hop summer music festivals we attended.

My eight-year-old niece joined me with new-found respect while unrelentingly competing with my raging inner child.  She wrote bad movie scripts, which we filmed and acted late into the night. She challenged me to sword fights with the plastic swords her parents purchased at the circus, and she dared me to race her down the slopes of our forest hikes. I accepted her invitation to compete and afterwards argued vigorously that she cheated when she had in fact won.  

My niece, with the Cuban and Irish ancestry, large hazel blue eyes, and strawberry wavy blond hair broke into spontaneous Broadway song because she wanted to perform on its stage. she was wilder and more beautiful than I was at her age.  Even though my sister used her as a confidante to her adult problems--the same way my mother had used me, a pattern I warned my sister not to repeat because of its onerous burden on her daughter--Issa had Youtube on her side, an antidote to the confining, debilitating smallness of being a confidant to a misguided and narcissistic parent.   

Her imagination was stirred with audio books, toys, and fashion videos. She wrote scripts for home movies and recorded her own Christmas albums as inspired by others on YouTube.  Because technology had stretched her world beyond the confines of her problems at home, she had more spaciousness and insights than I ever did at her age, so she figured me a mix of beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, fun and serious--a tension of opposites she deduced because I didn’t own a car, but rented one when I needed it; I shared her beautiful features but was older with grey hair and wrinkles; and I laughed and played during the day and locked myself in my room to read, write, and sleep at night. Still, Issa had no clue something was amiss.

No one figured it out, even though I looked disheveled-- hair uncombed, skin tone uneven, and eyes half-shut or dilated from taking a sliver of a bite of the gummy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.   The others occasionally raised their eyebrows at my high-octane enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t notice when I started stuttering my words or replacing them with nonsensical ones: “Can you please pass the tablecloth?” Instead of salt.

My sister was determined to do what she wanted when she wanted, and her endless daily to-do lists included activities from sunup to sundown with a repeat of some of those same activities, like a morning and night visits to the sauna and whirlpool of the Finnish bathhouse in town. Her pace was frenetic, manic, and a compulsory repeat of her daily life in New York City. Not even the roaring power of the Pacific, lofty height of the redwood trees, or shifting daily weather patterns, from fog to rain to sun, could convince her to stop and take it in.  When I commented to her husband that his family was a handful, he snidely remarked, “Well, we don’t have a choice, do we?’ he said.

“You don’t have a choice, but I do,” I said, as I walked away from him, slammed the bedroom door behind me, and bit into another sliver of the gummy I kept hidden in my pant pocket.

My brother-in-law was a detached man with a head of tight auburn curls and squinty and speckled blue eyes he hated to focus on anything.  He preferred silence and spent most of his time after work listening to professional development talks on political correctness needed to be a middle school teacher in the highly diversified New York City public schools; my sister accused him of listening to bureaucratic mumbo jumbo –prejudice veiled as the right thing to say, not do--which played loudly in their home on Staten Island.  Since he was silent most days of the year, he felt compelled to be lively and interactive on his yearly family vacations, but even that got on his nerves, too.

I was determined to claim my boundaries and stake my space in my 350 ft apartment where my sister and her husband slept in sleeping bags in the living room: I shut and locked my bedroom door and insisted they leave for several hours during the morning so that I could get my online teaching work done, now suffering from lapses in memory from taking too many gummies, including forgetting to return student calls, grading papers, and holding weekly chats.

When my sister and brother-in-law argued late into night, both using a whiny, repetitive passive aggressive tone and stance to get their way about next day’s activities, I played background brown noise, a rich soothing, air-blowing sound that lulled me into deep sleep. When she knocked on my door to badmouth her husband, I said loudly that she was married now and needed to figure things out with him, even though I feared the angry look in her eyes.

She was a bully, and I cowered to it.  All my life, I was also bullied by my mother, and father, as if being a victim was my rightful place in the family. To avoid bad words, pushing, spitting, and hitting, I became a weasel--running, hiding, and lying to avoid violence. What I wanted was silence, peace, and solitude, a life on another planet.  But, as life on earth would have it, my whole existence became a loop of victimhood--friends, ex-husband, lovers bullied me, too, and I accepted it as normal because I didn’t know how to acknowledge or defend my hurt feelings. Those feelings had been calcified as trauma deep in my cell memory, further compounded with the political correctness I picked up here and there until my body and spirit were punctured, hunched over, and defeated enough to not look anyone in the eyes for fear they would hurt me some more. 

That is until my mother left me a deathbed message/order about how to handle myself for the rest of my life:

“Don’t do what you’re told. Don’t do what you read. Don’t do what others expect. Don’t worry about being good, bad, indifferent, kind, compassionate… none of it counts if doesn’t come from your heart--and most never figure out what’s in there anyway. Don’t worry about God or the Devil; I’ve dealt with both, and they’ll respect you if you do what you must. Especially, never flinch at the consequences of your heart-fueled actions, whatever they may be.”

She could have been passing the bullying baton onto me, but I took it as a clarion call to erase family programming and live life on my terms.  Not easy! Since my mother’s death a year ago, I practiced speaking my truth, slowly and cumbersomely. I told the cantankerous UPS guy to put packages under the awning so that they wouldn’t get wet in from the rain, and I told the sidewalk activists who asked for my signature on their paperwork that I didn’t believe in their causes.  Some rolled their eyes, mumbled under their breath, or confronted me for what I said.  I blushed, stuttered, and hesitated while my heartbeat raced and beads of sweat formed on my forehead, but I looked them in the eyes and stuttered through my responses.  My goal… to dissect, like a neurosurgeon with a scalpel, the muck from the brain juice that knew only my authentic, true, vulnerable yet brave self in all situations.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for my sister and her family’s visit.  It was too soon, and I hadn’t yet mastered the skill of speaking the truth. I tried to talk her out of coming by telling her it was raining in North California every day, and that there had been earthquakes, lies. I also told her my 350 square foot apartment was too small to comfortably house four people for five weeks, true. Still, she bulldozed me with her plans, insisting that time would fly and that she would be gone before I knew it.

Pot saved the day, but three weeks into her visit, I ran out of steam, so that when she mentioned going back to the bathhouse that morning I refused.

“I’m not going,” I said with no hesitation, while preparing the stove and pan for the omelets I was cooking for breakfast that morning.

“Why not?” she asked, her voice tinged with annoyance.

  “Because I’m tired of going there,” I said, nervously.

“She was quiet, and so was I. As a trial attorney in New York City, she used silence to make the opposing side squirm, as I was now doing.

“You go. I need my space,” I said, stuttering while putting the egg carton on the counter and turning around to face her.

“From me?”

“Yeah,’ from you,

We were in a face-off like we were as teenagers when she charged at me, tore my shirt, and pushed me against the wall; that is before I ran off.

“Bitch, you have some nerve saying that to me in front of my daughter.”

My niece ran out of the apartment to get her father who was packing the rented SUV for that day’s activities.

“And you have the nerve calling me names in my house. YOU have never respected my boundaries or me!” I said, taking an egg from the carton and flinging at her. When it hit the wall, I watched the yolk and sticky stuff splatter and run down the wall and brown carpet in slow motion. “That’s going to stink”, I thought to myself.

Her brown eyes fumed with rage. When she charged at me, she lifted her arms, closed her fists, pressed her lips, lowered her head, and held her breath in order to gain speed and momentum, difficult with her middle-age girth. She looked like my angry father--large forehead, thick brows, dark eyes, and round stomach—a man who beat up the post man, cashier, master of ceremonies at the neighborhood parade…. because he didn’t like the tone of their voice, remark, or God knows what.  I never heard or knew what started the fight. He had always inched up to his victim as if he was going to tell them a secret before he unleashed a horrifying volley of fists, which made me keep a good amount of distance between us for the rest of his life.

My sister came at me in a halo of light, thanks to the extra sliver of gummy I bit off that morning. Rage, anxiety, and adrenaline built up in my system, so I faced her down. She stopped hard and almost tripped in front of me before regaining her footing, pulling back her closed fist, and punching in the upper arm.

“Ow,” I said before I slapped across the face. She put her hand up to her cheek, her stare filled with rage, as was mine. My audacity was unfamiliar even to me. Heat emitted from my skull. My anger was alive and breathing.  I was like a secret agent fighting for an identity lost on such a life-long covert operation all was forgotten. My heartbeat raced and face flushed.  When she pulled my hair, I pulled hers, too. Our necks were stretched, backs tilted. I kicked her on the shin. She let out an “ow.”   She kicked me on the shin. I let out another “ow.”  Our actions were slow and cumbersomely rhythmic. “Come on now, come on. Stop it, stop it,” her husband ran into the apartment, grabbed his wife by her free arm, and pulled her away.  “Just stop it now,” he ordered, giving me the flash of an annoyed look for ruining their vacation.

I turned my back and returned to cooking, my heartbeat fast, body limp, heart smiling. After all these years, I stood my ground, and it felt like a tumorous glacier of correctness started melting, leaving me lightheaded.

“Let’s get our things and go,” she said to her husband and daughter.  When they were in the car, she screamed “crazy bitch,” out the window, so I ran out of my apartment with my carton of eggs and threw them one by one at their car, hitting the back window, trunk, tire. When she got out of the car and made a gesture to run back at me, I threw another egg that whizzed past her head. 

I stood proudly on my balcony, throwing eggs at a world I never thought friendly. Not anymore! The world wasn’t ruffled by my violence; there was enough room on the horizon to throw at it what I wanted.  The sun-soaked sky was a glassy blue, and scattered clouds moved across it like a school of fish. “Just passing by,” they seemed to say as the wind pushed them over the tips of the redwoods and into oblivion. The world wouldn’t contract, lash out, or hold up a disapproving finger like its human counterparts tended to do; it welcomed my violence, bad words, and hurt and angry heart, having waited long to receive them.

Into the distance, where the bay swirled its way to the grumbling Pacific Ocean, I heard in the early morning hours when traffic on Highway 101 was non-existent, I excommunicated all the correctness that kept me rigid from cell to soul, dooming my dried-up emotions to that of a living ghost. I remembered a quote from one of my favorite English actresses, Charlotte Rampling: “The best remedy for any sort of pain is to let it happen to you. Resistance of pain, either physical or psychological, is the most painful.”

My next-door neighbor, a student at the local college, stepped on his balcony and smiled. I smiled back as I took another egg from the carton and threw it hard and fast into the horizon like I did when I pitched softball games in my youth.  I was a divorced mother of two young adults who recently graduated from college; still, that didn’t figure in my ludicrous, age-inappropriate, and glorious actions.  

When my niece turned around to look, I saw the painful expression in her eyes, and I screamed out, “Not, you, Issa,” before blowing her a kiss. Then I took the last egg in the carton and pitched it past my sister’s moving car into a clear, California-blue sky.