sara paye

SHOW ME YOUR PALM

We were 19 and careless and living in Los Angeles.

I wore cowboy boots as a chronic condition. “These boots are good enough to wear to bed,” was the first thing I said when you called me to talk about your day. You had gone to the beach to read East of Eden with your toes in the sand, but just off the shore there were oil rigs fucking the planet.

Your voice was quiet but not quite a whisper when you said, “I hate the way they push and pull, push and pull,” and of course I was thinking of sex. When we questioned romance, it boiled down to swearing our individual trajectories toward God, not each other.

We were either spinning fractals back to back or climbing mountains that had no descent. I had just hung up with the water bottle company who boasted ethics on its plastic label. It was my pastime to harass them for providing clean water to children only.

“What about the elderly?” I asked. I wasn’t going to give up, but then you called. You and I meandered in thermal space, a dimension created by hot breath over distance—you in Auntie Faye’s attic off Sepulveda Boulevard, me at midnight along the grassy lawn outside of Engstrom dorms.

There wasn’t rain but there was dew. Your voice was run down to the wire. My ears were electric with listening, every sound you made a measurement between fingernail and skin, palm, and knuckle. We wanted to make it work, or maybe if nothing else, I know I did.

I let you talk until it was all about your shit-pay internship where you taught English to the comadres on the East side. There are lots of palm trees there, but no boulevards, just hills glittering with glowing rooms. Some of those rooms are shrouded in fuzzy LA Dodgers blankets. No matter the time of day, the sky is always lavender, always twilight.

You tutored the many mothers of those many setting suns. With your last five dollars, you purchased a cedar tortilla press from the wrinkly creases of dough and lard and care and shushing. You did not pay for a gold line ticket to get to my door. Folding your wallet into your coat of many colors, your hands are the kind with outturned thumbs that strum the old guitars you call busking and strangely enough, you have webbed feet.

I was surprised when you and the tortilla press made it to my shacky blue modular home in Azusa, the one neighboring a field of dreams. My porch light had been on for hours, buzzing with moths. You were there with your worn Clark tie-ups to make tacos with me in my cowboy boots. But you ended up breaking the gift of your time when you snapped the tortilla press handle in half. You pressed too hard. We didn’t laugh. There was no ricochet of sound to measure with my fingertips. Yet our particular kind of silence had movement. Toward my salty tears, you eventually said, “He who gives also takes away.”

I didn’t know what you meant until my obsession with you became a dismissible memory, a feather falling from behind my ear. We never held hands, never met mouths after all that dialectic history. If you showed me your palm today, the remnant from ten years of celibacy would be one cedar splinter lodged in between your love lines. So when you added, “It’s over,” were you talking about the tortilla press, the oil rigs, or me?

Sara Paye is an MFA graduate of The University of Nevada, Reno at
Tahoe. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with her family.