Zelda

The definition of a little girl is standing in the doorway, asking me in a half-whine to please try to catch that butterfly in the backyard. Looking out the door, I see a wavering ocean of overgrown plants. Poking out of the grass are two playsets, but the determined backyard has reclaimed them both in the name of nature--anyone sliding down the slide would get a mouthful of spiderweb. I squint. The butterfly is actually a papery moth, and would require extensive navigational tactics. I say I don't think I can get to it in time, but maybe today's goal should be to catch a butterfly. Zelda gives me a Lucille Ball-like grimace, her eyes inflating and the corners of her mouth dipping down comically. This is my favorite face.
We're standing barefoot in the kitchen, on a floor covered in glazed pieces of brightly colored pots and crockery, cool under our feet, as we're essentially walking on dishes. Her mother designed it. A small cd player is in the middle of the kitchen floor, and my voice is drifting out of the speakers. Zelda seems to feel my songs; she starts to sing a little while moving in a distracted half-dance, smiling at me almost encouragingly, like i should dance to my own voice with her. I'm very anxious for her opinion. I find children to be the most honest critics, if not the most important. At six, Zelda is at a ripe age for honesty.
"So do you like it?" I venture, squatting beside her.
Her face gets serious. She says plainly, "Why don't you make more of these CD's and sell them?" which wraps me up warmly inside the center of a star.
As we sit on the porch, eating strawberry jam directly out of the jar, I contemplate my love for Zelda. She's named after Zelda Fitzgerald, and that's all she really knows about that. She has aspirations of being a paleontologist, surrounding herself with as much literature about dinosaurs as she can check out from the juvenile section of the local library. A plastic bin crammed with dinosaurs and one stray My Little Pony waits in the bathtub.
I don't know why, but I correlate the fact that she doesn't go to school with the fact that she's consistently pleasantly unkempt. If I might adopt the six-year-old criteria for friendship, where ties form very quickly with a lack of forethought on either side, then Zelda and I are best friends. We've eaten popsicles together in the crawlspace of my attic, where we took turns peering out of the beautiful window that opens out rather than up, like a drawbridge. We've played cards together (war and crazy eights) using her special dinosaur-themed cards. We've covered my driveway in chalk. She left her favorite stuffed animal, a bunny with no face named Patricia, in the back of my car, and, after a flurry of questions about why i wanted to know and making me swear I wouldn't tell anyone, especially not her sister, she showed me the best hiding place in her house. She makes a lot of faces at me throughout the 3 hours I babysit her, all under a tangle of blonde hair, and usually baring her teeth slightly. The front teeth must have come in early, and they're oddly chipped; they look like two tiny square paws.
We're allowed to sit on her roof, and we did yesterday, with her older sister (11, harder to read). The roof and our presence felt nearly holy, or at least oddly nostalgic, like someone was using a gold filter over the moment.
Zelda's mother was on the porch below, nursing a cigarette. I'd just spoken to her downstairs, or rather she spoke to me, warbling through her southern drawl "Ah get a little jealous sometimes, Ah get short with Zelda sometimes. Cos I never got to be six." blows out smoke and laughs. "And then she says 'mama whaddya mean you never got to be six?'"She's a doughy woman, wears dresses that look a lot like Zelda's in terms of how much they cover up. She's occasionally bra-less and her legs are always bare, and flecked with brightly colored paint, the same colors I often find all over her children. I imagine her hips as having indentations where her fists fit. Sometimes her face has a flash of Zelda in it. It's not quite a physical likeness of her, but more like the expression Zelda has when I pose her a question like 3+1+1. "But, if you've got one foot in the past and one in the present, then you're just pissin' on today, you know?" she follows this with a volume of laughter that I really wish I could match, because then I would feel more like a woman.

On the roof, Zelda leans next to me and I ask her, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?
She looks at me and says whaddya mean?
Well, if one is low and ten is as happy as possible.
She still looks confused.
Out of 1 to 10, how happy are you?
"A hundred!" she yells, incredulous that I could limit the possibilities like that.

Ten minutes later, as I'm leaving, I can't find her. Her mom points me into the bathroom, where she is standing in the corner by the sink, her face buried in a towel.
"Bye Zelda," I say nicely.
"Bye," comes muffled through the towel.
"Can I see your pretty face before I go?" I touch her shoulder lightly.
No.

here she is in a video her sister shot on her phone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJPplWaExxU
sometimes i feel like if i don't write i will explode, and i guess that is a good thing.

steering whales, radiant brains, and resuming contact

Three days a week I drive a great white whale of a van, and on those days the whale slowly empties and refills itself with old people. Elderly people are teaching me about patience. On average, it takes an old person two and a half minutes to get into my van, which means I can mentally drag my hand over my face about seventeen times. I'm genial with them, I comment earnestly on the weather, but I try to pose meatier questions--how long have you lived here? What did you do? Can they cram 70+ years of their lives into a 6 minute shuttle ride? They love settling into the past tense.
"I was in a mortar attack in Korea that killed everyone in my regiment but me," one man says grimly, after I ask him how he enjoyed the 4th of July. "Fireworks aren't really my thing anymore. When they start going off, I want to wave a white flag out the window or something." It hadn't always been that way. In the mid 1930's, his family used to drive from Berkeley to Oakland on independence day, and they'd lay out a picnic and watch the fireworks along the river. "But now," he says wryly, "I just don't want anybody popping off any balloons behind me or anything."
"I attended school here from '49-'53," muses another. "Not many people'd remember this, but I remember when the Fremont bridge was being built on the barges and then was floated to where it is today, lifted with screws and all that--I guess Archimedes did his job," he chuckles. "I had my two kids and was going through a divorce at the time, so that bridge was good cheap entertainment."
"You should really get a stool for us old folks," one withered woman interrupts. She has thick white hair and ironic super-hero-like sunglasses. Captain Snippy.
I wrote a mini-song about one of my favorite passengers, an older giggly woman with a horrible crop of moles all over her neck and cheek.

"Joan
Joan
You're so cute
Your socks always match
Your sweatpants suit"

In more melodramatic news, where are the bright batches of people? The papers try to convince me I don't live in a town this quiet. No matter; I have a code, one that dials into everyone. It buzzes nutso when it's time to clink ideas together.
But as of late, I'm running low on the brains that whirr and glow. I'll keep flipping for a match. One day I'll strike, and the match will catch.

oh my god, my phone just turned back on.

--ariana