Raining on Beckett

Somewhere in the central of New England, Jamie was surrounded by a light that she could not see. On this rain soaked and blurry September night her energies were focused mainly upon the dog-eared and multi-creased book in her hands, a play by the English writer Beckett that she was to be teaching her graduate class in the Fall. Always she was rereading and rethinking the texts she taught her classes, making it a point every semester to try coming up with a different approach than the semester before. And tonight, two weeks before the start of classes, she became so absorbed in Beckett's persistent and forgetful
vagabonds that she hadn't noticed how sticky and uncomfortable she was, and how dark the room had become.

She had been reading since sunset and finally got up, now almost three hours later, joints popping like bubble-wrap, to open her living room windows. She paused briefly to breathe in the rain-soaked air and observe the traffic at the busy intersection below her third floor apartment, following with her eyes a blue four-door that reflected the streetlight off its roof as it passed by. She closed her eyes and saw
spots. The wet air shot up her nasal passages like a cool dart, and pierced the surface of her lungs. It felt good.

She returned to her position on the couch and picked up the book again. Jamie was passionate about literature, about the written word and the deeper meanings hidden within it. She even, in the privacy of her office or her home, indulged in the secret passion of smelling books. She loved the scent of the pages, the ink, the thoughts of the author, the motivations behind the thoughts...Her life was devoted to teaching and sharing this passion, and she thrived on the interaction and feedback she received from her students. There was always a different way to look at a story, poem or play, another idea to challenge hers, and almost always an impassioned debate waiting to take place. She loved nothing more than seeing a hand go up in the air.

The phone rang, startling her, and she hesitated before answering, taking the second and third rings to quickly decide whether she was in
the mood to talk to anyone. She hoped it wouldn't be her friend Rita, who had become overbearing in her infatuation with the computer repairman in her office. Every day, Jamie "got the 411" about every look and nuance made by a total stranger she knew she would totally dislike if she ever actually met. She loved Rita dearly, but sometimes
her obsessions with men became akin to watching someone's vacation slides, repeatedly every night, with narration. Why don't I have a caller ID box? she wondered, and finally picked up her see-through, electric blue cordless. She smiled weakly when she heard the voice on
the other end.

"Hi honey it's mom, what's going on out there?"

Jamie's family lived in Monroe, Michigan, where she was born and raised. After she graduated high school, she had been eager to move away to college and get out from under her father's strict religious roof that she felt increasingly stifled by the older she got, and the east coast seemed a perfect choice to relocate. After finishing her graduate studies in North Carolina, she was hired to teach in New England and she was so ecstatic she cried. New England was a place of fantastic revolutionary history and the birthplace of so much literature that she loved: Thoreau, Hemingway, Plath...

"Hi ma, nothing is going on, what's up?"

"Sam said he talked to you last week and you sounded on the down side." Sam was Jamie's brother who lived in Apache Junction, Arizona...Home of the Superstition Mountains.

"He just called on a busy day that's all, I was beat when we talked. Really ma, don't worry about me, I'm fine." Jamie's mother was as
overbearing in her motherly concern as much as Rita was about whatever guy from work she wanted to screw that week. Jamie wasn't married and lived on her own, hundreds of miles away from home, and her mother couldn't seem to fully embrace this as an acceptable course of action for a woman Jamie's age to take. Her thirty-two year old PhD daughter surely needed a man to get by in life.

But just the opposite was true; Jamie's interest in men was never based on anything more than casual friendship or a business relationship. Men didn't light any kind of spark inside of her, and most of the men she met outside, and inside, the academic lair in which she lived were power-hungry and sexually obsessive boy-men who couldn't hold her attention with a gallon of glue.

"Well I hope you're not taking on too much," her mother went on, "you don't want to burn out like your brother is about to."

Jamie loved it when the goings-on in the life of one sibling seemed to somehow reflect the lives of the rest of them in her mother's mind. Sam was burning himself out, so naturally a casual mention of a busy day on her part, or Danny or Elsie's part, is instant cause for concern. All of her children, woe is her, are now on the verge of total mental and physical breakdown. It gave her something to talk about at her lunch meetings with the local bank teller's union, that was how Jamie saw it. Why should she care what a group of middle-aged women halfway across the country are thinking about her life? Except of course that one year when her sister Elsie was having a string of hemorrhoid eruptions, and her mother proceeded to tell at least half of the guests at a family function that her children were having bowel problems. After that, Jamie had to conference call with her siblings, whereupon they all decided not to tell Mom about the more embarrassing aspects of life.

"Sam has always pushed himself to work ma, you know that, and he's always been fine, too." Jamie walked over to the refrigerator and
removed a container of onion dip and a bottle of spring water, followed by a small bag of potato chips from the cabinet to her left. All she
could think about, as her mother went on and on about the benefits of an afternoon nap, was the fact that she should be reading; the semester
started in two weeks and she wasn't as prepared as she normally was at this point. She had already read and taught Beckett's play before, as
well as every other book to be read in the class, but she liked to prepare and refresh, always refresh.

"Look mom, I know...yes, I take a nap every chance I get, now I have to go, I'm putting together my reading schedules...right, okay, love to dad...okay, bye." Jamie hung up the phone and felt a pang of guilt for rushing her mother off the phone and lying about making her reading
schedules. She only saw her parents twice a year, sometimes three or four depending on time and money, and a constant reminder that they weren't getting any younger seemed programmed into her brain. She knew that she herself was not technically "old" at thirty-two, but when
she turned thirty the passage of time became much clearer, and harsher, and ruthless. There were days when time beat down on her like the sun
throwing fireballs, pounding her every thought with its reminder that tick, tick yet another second had just gone by. Or was it two seconds?
She didn't know, it was too fast...

Chips and onion dip stuck to the roof of her mouth and coated her tongue like bad milk, pasty and slick. She took long swigs from the bottle of Glacial Mist, and felt the icy coldness go all the way down to her navel.

Somewhere in the next town, a kid with no time bought a set of cliff notes.