Transverse Orientation (Part 1)
A hybrid essay by Lin Elizabeth
The behavior of the moth being attracted to light is called ‘transverse orientation’. They keep a fixed angle on a light source— ideally towards the moon. It helps them fly a straight line. According to National Geographic, it’s akin to humans, long before the congestion of cityscapes poking pores into the glittering bombs lightyears away, taking the course of the North Star, in a certain fixed position. If you’ve ever watched a moth, they’re batting against the light against the cobwebbed sconce when you're outside in the damned cold again smoking another American Spirit, they think all light has open surroundings, it’s the moon, it has to be thus the incessant, faint, whip, whip, whip, whip.
The light confuses the moth. It’s not the moon, it’s a light that will flick off when you step in, the toe of your shoe muddied with ash, muttering about how the days can’t get fucking longer.
You know who has funerals for moths?
I don’t think anyone.
Sea turtles pray to go back to a colder sea, the toddler sucks a pacifier on the street in their stroller, the heroin your uncle puts into his veins in a dingy car stop on the way to Arizona to keep from getting dope sick overnight, trekking back to familiar turf.
This is suicide. This is also survival. This is the safer bet.
Sometimes, the same thing looks very different in the light.
“Eat your dinner.” My Mother hums, hair still damp after her post-gym shower, it is already curling up in the humidity of the oven-on kitchen. Blonde mop with gray fading in naturally. Bare-faced but still airbrushed, her secret to her skin was aloe gel and whatever godsend DNA her Mother had.
I am standing in the hall leading up the stairs, as she says thi, I walk to the kitchen, a mess of bright fruit, recipe books, pens—sweets—she’s taken up baking for her new hobbies, and sit at the rickety dinner table, it’s wooden lines where I would draw perfect circles with the fork tines, sigh.
I push the potatoes around on my plate, the gravy, gravying, doing whatever gravy does, soaking its juices into the mush, the meat steak to the left of the grease it was smothered in, and you guessed it, gravy, with French sauteed onions and green beans coated in honey.
“Can I eat it later?” A question, I knew the response to already, but I still ask. What is it when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result? Insanity.
She sighs, leans into the kitchen bar, stool covered in letters, books she takes to her classes she goes to at suspiciously inconvenient times, like at lunchtime, when she cannot make me sandwiches, allow me to make my own, or inevitably DoorDash because Fuck, everything is expired again.
Never good with timing, in this household.
“Fine. Do what you want.” My Mother retreated upstairs to get ready for work. It was more of a statement. Not a slap like you’d expect it to be.
Everything changed: a butterfly in Bhutan flapped its wings, and a tsunami occurred, and the whole butterfly effect thing happened. A stupa collapsed. Pieces of peace mounds lost.
Whoosh off I went, like a wound-up greyhound on a racetrack, unsure of the prize, but sure it’ll be worth it.
In high school, all I did was skip school, smoke weed, and get exceptional grades. The teachers had to water the classes down to help the (en masse poor, minority-dominated, poor, wrong side of town) population at) school they taught at, and never had to explain because I was white and middle class.
I saw the teachers as who they were: being in a position where you have to perform a certain way, when you see so much hurt and growth every day, you become determined to be the best, even if it's to your detriment.
I was observing. Always listening to intricate “nasty” rap with the red-flagged black boys in Algebra, trading re-edited papers for the occasional joint with the high-strung, barred out on Daddy’s stash of pills athletes, talking to the cholas in the bathroom in the mornings, eyeliner as sharp as their fathers’ beer bottle caps.
Mom also had a few big problems: a trigger finger at slot machines, a haunting love affair with men named Jack, Evan, and Mark, hid well under many combinations of little pills in orange bottles, and sometimes cigarette silicone plastic coatings held her with the comedowns. Lying to the doctors about certain intakes of things, while I swing my feet in the chair next to her, perch on the parchment. I was always wondering if they were playing a game.
I’d get pulled from class for consultations, friendly, snack-filled, “honest” evaluations from time to time about my Mother and her problems. I’d look at them and play the games with them too, a Kit-Kat for things are all in the good hat, Mrs. So and So.
If I were honest, open, and willing to help everyone out, I’d tell the nice, overly perfumed (to cover up the menthol cigarette smoke smell) of a woman in too dark a shade of lipstick, that—Mom was using again—using something; someone—maybe me even. I wasn't too sure that she was trying anymore; she stopped going to church. No prayer before dinner anymore, but she’s at the gym, those places said something about exercise, into action.
Her job was hard, though— she danced at a gentlemen’s club in the inner city at night. Dueling the slow season, she would bartend at the club and meet up with regulars outside of work. The ‘P’ word was not a sin in our house. Women left with nothing have to take back what they can; we were lesser in all forms except one. I think of the late nights, watching MTV until she gets home, her skin glowing from the cold and sweat with bags in tote, keys laced in her finger. (She carried pepper spray and brass knuckles; I never understood that habit) Why do they care about her and ask me? It seemed lazy. She’s the adult here. I am not the one to observe her. It’s not my job to tell other adults what my om does. She’s not mine to put in a box and shake about and ask if she is good. What about me? Where would I go if I were honest? I needed this place too much. The high school cradled me in ways books cradle small-town Ohio girls who only dream of being the quarterback's wife. A life I was refusing to live. Something about it seemed all too vague for me to even bother to say anything. We were symbiotic.
One day at the school fair put on, for ‘community building’, (there had been a nearby drive by, overdose of a staff member’s assistant in school, a school shooting close by, the bordering state overall in the same month.) A few girls were selling small earrings they made on the side, after school. Clay gnomes hanging from Hobby Lobby earrings studs with googly eyes, letter molded trays that were of sparkling rubber, succulents they made from pipe cleaner and yarn, resin flower moons keychains. All these trinkets made us who we were. I was talking to one of them about the process of everything, and the other two were talking about boys.
A hooped earringed, curly-haired, freckled-faced girl I knew from the bathrooms in the morning was talking about guys with the other. She had recently moved from The Bronx to a small town outside of Chicago. Her sister taught at the school, so she got in, despite not being in the district. Her accent was all bubble-gummed. Her slang. Her father was a deadbeat alcoholic whom she hadn’t seen since she was 5. She asked me. “Who are you into, boo?”
I stalled. I didn’t know what she meant. A boy?
Boys, at times, grow up into men. I swatted at them like the tail of a horse at biting flies. I took a beat. Remembered faces. Some guys would try to make moves on me at parties I would sneak out to. I always rolled my eyes and just looked at them: standing there, drunk, lonely, red-faced. Babyish. The silence I gave them should’ve been deafening enough. An air of disappointment always followed. Like a Mother scolding her young son for playing in scat.
“You’re joking? They’re all disappointing.” I said, laughing, flicking my eyes at her and the others. Moved on to talking about how to cement resin with the other girl.
She laughed loudly, said, “Bitch, that’s the realest shit I’ve heard in my life.”
I’ve seen what boys who sometimes grow into men could do. My father would get me every so often, ice cream in a cupholder upon arrival, weak attempts at making up for fucking his secretary behind Mom’s back for almost 5 years of their marriage. Shitty boxed lasagna, Miserable Putt-Putt evenings, and pleas of movies about superheroes. I didn’t want anything from him. He tried too hard. My Mother said once: It’s the ones who try the hardest that have the emptiest hands. I learned that throughout high school.
They were together for 8 years, including when I was born. Mother, after finding out about the affair, then realized she was raising two people. So she settled for just the one. The newer one made more sense, she’d joke.
“They’re beautiful, when you get down to it, but they’re weak. Creatures of lower power.” She said, talking about men one night, lining her lips on the entryway mirror, before her shift one hard night. Sweats and a hoodie over a g-string and a corset. Hair in a slicked-back ponytail, high on her head. Braided to kill. 8-inch heeled leather boots in a quilted briefcase. Professional even in her entrance in the neon night
Her hazel eyes softened when she looked at me. Turning from the mirror to me, at the foot of the stairs leading up to our three rooms, I departed into a rare hotel stay. night. “Love you, mean it.” She kissed her fingertips and put them in the air towards me, and shut the wood-framed door hastily with a click lock, as she jumbled off. Dinner out on the table, still no prayer.
Early on, when I was too young to be on my own in the nights she’d work, a girlfriend of hers, Natalie, would watch me. Your Mother’s Mother died when she was 22. Her name was Eden. She’d say, braiding my hair after showers, as if I didn’t know. As if my Mother didn’t pace the halls upstairs at night quietly mumbling, her name seeping out, when she thinks I’m asleep.
My Mother never really talked about her Mother, except in her meetings. Talking about the ‘program’ her Mother worked on, how she died with an infinity chip, whatever that meant. The sinner born-again saint that never touched her daughter after her adulthood baptism. She found out her daughter was still giving her fleshly body up for cold, hard cash, so that shut down the relationship. She had died in a grease fire at a restaurant.
Natalie was fascinating to watch. Young-looking but mature, she talked in a soft manner like old actresses would. Her tongue was a whip, though. She was a natural redhead, tiny but had a long gazelle figure, tattoos all up her right leg and arms. A mantis on her stomach. Head and pinchers pointing down. Always had small bruises on her inner elbow and wads of various dollar bills in her small purse. Her laugh bellowed, and she was the most herself I think anyone could ever be. Her stage name was Molly. I saw the tickets in her work bag sometimes, like my Mother’s when I fetch from her bag…
You just read Part 1 of “Transverse Orientation” by Lin Elizabeth. Part 2 can be read here.
Lin Elizabeth is an Arkansas-based poet. She touches on many things like sex work, dogs, hospitals, rabbits, and sobriety. The poet has a chapbook out entitled Year of the Rabbit, published by Hidden Hand Press. She can be found on Instagram at @borrowedpotpourri
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