Free Strange Cowboy by Sam Michel Page B

suggest she breathe. My duty is to ask her please
     to focus on that quiet place inside her, a brook, could be, falling high up through
     a mountain meadow, or underneath that cottonwood beside the stilled and deepening
     river; I describe for her the pebbled seaside she once went to as a girl, where she
     must have walked once, and had watched once, and had heard and felt the storied waters
     turn the pebbles clicking each one over on the other—waters-in, waters-out—smoothening,
     and polishing, talkingly, to her, through the bottoms of her feet, perhaps, and through
     her nose, and pores, inspiring confidence, and continuity, whispering to her, this is as it shall be and has forever been, and she is this, and this is she—the waters-in, the waters-out, the smoothened pebble
     clicking in the rocking tidal wash—at rest in motion, in motion cleansed, safe in
     rest, undangered and unpained, so long as she remains inside there. Push, I tell her. She must push, scream and count; I tell her, coachingly, that she must breathe. So she pushes, screams and breathes, and breathing she becomes the boy to me, the
     birth again, again she smiles as she describes the boy’s smile, as I describe my father’s.
     And then I ask her: Was it ecstasy she felt while chewing through her bottom lip?
     Did her veins burst from her face for happiness? If it is happiness recorded in the
     photographs she ordered me to take of her, then why should she be saddened by the
     image she perceives there?
    “Oh, I look so dumpy,” says my wife. “My hair’s stuck to my head. You didn’t tell
     me there was blood on my gown. My God, I look like a half-wit. Put those things away,”
     she says, “that’s not the way that I remember it.”
    She forgets, as an example, that she refused to picture for herself a seaside, or
     she says that she was drugged. How else explainherself? She knows very well what seasides are. If she said she wasn’t sure if seasides
     ought to have a lighthouse, or a sandy beach, or rocky, or if there ought to be a
     boardwalk and a Ferris wheel or rather seaoats hissing on the leesides of deserted
     dunes, then I should be ashamed for not assisting her in choosing which she ought
     to picture. And if I truly had been urging on her the deserted seaside, and she truly
     had rejected it, well, then, I should be ashamed of failing to direct her to the peopled
     seaside she desired. She liked people. Men. Men and women. She had her hopes, she
     meant to say; she was “basically an optimist.” She is afraid, she says, of being left
     alone; she would sooner share a bedroom at the Anchorage with Mother, than be made
     to contemplate that quiet place inside her. That quiet place, she will remind me, is a pit. She said she was surprised to find
     it. She went once, as a girl, she closed her eyes and made as if she fell inside herself,
     falling upward, somehow, somehow thinking she might find, when she had finished falling,
     something to resemble something bright and clean as heaven. She did not. She lay in
     bed and fell and kept on falling through this pit until she could not say which way
     was up, and which way down, or where the light she thought was at the core of her
     had disappeared to. She was scared, scared, “just a girl,” she said; she thought it
     might be dangerous to turn her gazes inward.
    “Myself,” she says, “I need to see the good stuff.”
    So who doesn’t? I suggested, in my case, that she regard the good stuff as a person’s
     favorite serving on a plate of food, perhaps, and to think of me as being one who
     likes to save his favorite servings for the last. Furze, for instance, I would like
     to save out from the telling of this party, and waking up with Daddy. Whim, the horse.
     Barbecue, I tell my wife, the sauce, especially, I would like to save how many friends
     I played with in the hayloft.
    “It was war up there,” I told my wife. “All smokey, that funny sort of jumpy light.