Marie Monroe METCALF
Marie Monroe Metcalf has been published in Open Wide, Pudding, and Wind. She is currently combining several interests by putting the written word into visual works. She works in a state mental hospital with addicts and writes about it so that one day, she may have money for retirement.
LIBERAL ARTS
Even as a child I knew something horrible was happening in the Little Desert. Headed for Mass at St. Louis Bertrand, I'd start my prayers of protection in Central Park which was a good block and a half from the Little Desert, but no sanctuary of grace itself. Men in very short and tight pants sat on picnic tables in the park watching each other out of the corners of their eyes. Eventually they would one by one go into the bathroom and then reappear to sit on their respective tables. I knew they were of no physical danger to me, being interested, as they were, only in each other and the john, but still something about their Sunday morning rituals seemed ominous. I imagined the smell of urine hanging on them and somehow chasing me through the park. At times I held my breath to further protect myself from that contamination, clean as I was from yesterday's confession.I had watched body counts and battle scenes from Vietnam nightly all through elementary school. Now, as a pubescent, urban and virginal female. I knew my fractions, long division, decimals, squares, cubes, pre-algebra and was tip-toeing with every concrete muscle of my childmind toward abstract thinking. I knew about warfare, at least television warfare and math warfare. I knew how to run from safe crouch to belly down. I couldn't quite conjure the details of the evils lurking inside the bombed out structures of the Little Desert, but I knew that sex had something to do with it. I also knew that it absolutely was not the acceptable type of sex which was sex for God, but that this was sex of the damned-whatever that was. This sex was as dim as the few remaining bars in the Little Desert. It was as forbidden as the alleyways, and as mysterious and close as algebra circling around me, noticing my vulnerability, waiting patiently for me to become distracted easy prey. It was something very bad that did not go home on Saturday night to be fresh and ready for Mass on Sunday morning.
One thing seemed certain: the relentlessness of Gregorian chants at the base of your skull, or the Rosary, when applied to any unseen enemy were your best bets for continued mobility through the Desert toward salvation. A break in tempo, concentration or content could signal the predators. It was a stealth zone before the zone was cool or even invented. Math and Vietnam had been lifesavers. Something organic, with a physics far more dangerous than pulleys and levers pushed against these storefronts, watching me. I was not a stupid child. I knew how to calculate my odds of survival in hand-to-hand. It would never work. No, my strength lay in evasion. I would catapult into a stronger state of grace than ever before. I would perpetrate a coup of brilliance, submerge myself to breathe through reeds, sight the predator telepathically and clairsentiently. I would will my body to feline form, rustle no leaves, snap no twigs, run with the table of odds turned toward God, good, math and A's.
Years later I sat pondering the unforgivable flat man some rows below me as he scribbled numbers in pockets of brackets and parentheses. With a squint I could arrange the board into more visually meaningful arrays. Why did he slap these gorgeous creatures as if they were his whores? I am still hard pressed to pinpoint the exact origin of this disdain I've carried for him. Was it that day or another that I began to linger at the philosophy section, getting lost in pot and gibberish? I hold him responsible, that cut-out of an angry man.
My navigation at sea is as basic a skill now as my fingers' memory of cursive when I plot seduction in love letters or resumes. I no longer need my compass or can no longer find it. The world is wet and I am no longer a mathematician.