Why it is not sage to drink with the gays on a school night, or why Emma is un wisely posting, or why we like extra long titles in bold
As promised, or vaguely promised, the semi sort of drunken post, and I had it all laid out in my head in the cab home, about how I crossed the bar tender that I made out with, and how he liked the way I hooked his leg in mine, and how my grandfather pulled the trigger on a 45 caliber rifle with his toe, and how my grandmother kept it secret for five months blackmailing my father with his lover while my mother was freezing in a farmhouse in the South of France with a truffle snuffling pig, and I was busy learning to curse and fuck in a strange language, as I had only begun to know how to curse and fuck in my native tongue.
And there was an awkward dinner, and the pepper steak was inedible, and then there were the tears that no one could muster and the rage behind what was unshed.
And this was five months later mind you, and I still don't know where he is buried and it's probably better that way. Because the only thing I have ever done in graveyards is make out, or mourn, and I prefer the former.
And I celebrated my seventeenth year with a car accident.
I was having a party and Sophie had forgotten her bathing suit, it was hours before the guests arrived and my mother was making canapes and leant me the Renault 5 to fetch the suit, 10 miles down a road I had driven a thousand times before. It was May, it had rained and then ripened into one of those expansive kind of days that have rainbows and pots of gold.
I had on my seat belt, she did not, we were following a red car. I followed the red car into a turn and that is where I lost control. The red car took the turn on the slick road by breaking into the turn, I did not break until I was in the S part of the curve.
I was seventeen, a rookie driver.
I took the curve and skidded towards the embankment on the right side, I over-corrected and skittered across both lanes, the little Renault 5 plunged over the the left emankment, flipped over once, flipped over twice and landed upside down in a vineyard. That this was for a bikini was not lost on me.
What was...
Was, Sophie was hanging, she hadn't but on her seat belt, she had hit the dash board at a velocity and half of her face was hanging off and she was half upside down. Somehow I had lost my shoes. My sternum was bruised from the steering wheel, but I had not a scratch despite the fact that all of the windows were blown and the car had flipped twice. . She was semi-concious and I was terrified to leave her, but we were a good thirty yards from the road. No one could see us. Mind you, this was way before cell phones, a fax machine was a novelty. Somehow I managed to belt Sophie in and pushed the car over onto it's side so that, I thought, she wouldn't bleed to death in that position. And then I scuttled up to the road and I started to scream. And I screamed and screamed until my voice broke and a farmer came to our rescue.
Meanwhile my mother had a housefull of teenagers, until the call came though that her daughter and her daughter's friend were being ambulenced to the hospital in Draguignan. All I can remember of that trip were the flies, the flies that gathered on Sophie's face it was May, it was warm and they swarmed, they were ravenous, and the ET's were impervious and I kept telling them in English that they needed to keep the flies off of her.
We came back home, it wasn't late, but I felt old, my 14 year old brother had kept the party going in our staid. I don't know what happened to my mother but I got into the pool with my torn up feet and my guilt and my stitches, I had on a white tank top, my boyfriend at the time took me in his arms in the shallow end and said it would be all alright. And later it was. But there will always be a woman in the South of France who has a jagged scar down the left side of her face and people will always ask her, and maybe she's gracious about, or maybe she's not. The fact remains that on my seventeenth birthday I was feeling reckless and immortal and I took the turn too fast and all I lost were my shoes and all she lost was everything.
As promised, or vaguely promised, the semi sort of drunken post, and I had it all laid out in my head in the cab home, about how I crossed the bar tender that I made out with, and how he liked the way I hooked his leg in mine, and how my grandfather pulled the trigger on a 45 caliber rifle with his toe, and how my grandmother kept it secret for five months blackmailing my father with his lover while my mother was freezing in a farmhouse in the South of France with a truffle snuffling pig, and I was busy learning to curse and fuck in a strange language, as I had only begun to know how to curse and fuck in my native tongue.
And there was an awkward dinner, and the pepper steak was inedible, and then there were the tears that no one could muster and the rage behind what was unshed.
And this was five months later mind you, and I still don't know where he is buried and it's probably better that way. Because the only thing I have ever done in graveyards is make out, or mourn, and I prefer the former.
And I celebrated my seventeenth year with a car accident.
I was having a party and Sophie had forgotten her bathing suit, it was hours before the guests arrived and my mother was making canapes and leant me the Renault 5 to fetch the suit, 10 miles down a road I had driven a thousand times before. It was May, it had rained and then ripened into one of those expansive kind of days that have rainbows and pots of gold.
I had on my seat belt, she did not, we were following a red car. I followed the red car into a turn and that is where I lost control. The red car took the turn on the slick road by breaking into the turn, I did not break until I was in the S part of the curve.
I was seventeen, a rookie driver.
I took the curve and skidded towards the embankment on the right side, I over-corrected and skittered across both lanes, the little Renault 5 plunged over the the left emankment, flipped over once, flipped over twice and landed upside down in a vineyard. That this was for a bikini was not lost on me.
What was...
Was, Sophie was hanging, she hadn't but on her seat belt, she had hit the dash board at a velocity and half of her face was hanging off and she was half upside down. Somehow I had lost my shoes. My sternum was bruised from the steering wheel, but I had not a scratch despite the fact that all of the windows were blown and the car had flipped twice. . She was semi-concious and I was terrified to leave her, but we were a good thirty yards from the road. No one could see us. Mind you, this was way before cell phones, a fax machine was a novelty. Somehow I managed to belt Sophie in and pushed the car over onto it's side so that, I thought, she wouldn't bleed to death in that position. And then I scuttled up to the road and I started to scream. And I screamed and screamed until my voice broke and a farmer came to our rescue.
Meanwhile my mother had a housefull of teenagers, until the call came though that her daughter and her daughter's friend were being ambulenced to the hospital in Draguignan. All I can remember of that trip were the flies, the flies that gathered on Sophie's face it was May, it was warm and they swarmed, they were ravenous, and the ET's were impervious and I kept telling them in English that they needed to keep the flies off of her.
We came back home, it wasn't late, but I felt old, my 14 year old brother had kept the party going in our staid. I don't know what happened to my mother but I got into the pool with my torn up feet and my guilt and my stitches, I had on a white tank top, my boyfriend at the time took me in his arms in the shallow end and said it would be all alright. And later it was. But there will always be a woman in the South of France who has a jagged scar down the left side of her face and people will always ask her, and maybe she's gracious about, or maybe she's not. The fact remains that on my seventeenth birthday I was feeling reckless and immortal and I took the turn too fast and all I lost were my shoes and all she lost was everything.
posted by emma at
10:03 PM
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