by Marie Davis and Margaret Hultz
It was a thousand leagues deep where Lola touched Captain Lizzy; hers were the first fingers to swim there. Octopi, squid and darling, teeny fishes were surprised to see their arrival. Like Lizzy, they believed themselves protected from outsiders—after all who else would swim so deep to find love?
Resurfacing in bed much later, Lizzy watched the star-filled night yawn across her lover’s naked body. Lizzy whispered, “Lola, I swars, ye the wind in me sails.”
Without a word, the enchantress gathered Lizzy up by the hand and flew her to the crescent moon. Silently they rode it through the sky. Night-lights of stars waved as they passed. Around midnight, Lola fell asleep in Lizzy’s arms. Cuddled together in the cusp of the moon, legs dangling off the sides, she dreamed of her childhood.
Lola was born with those black eyes. Her father fell into them when he first saw her. It took nearly three years for him to crawl out, but when he did, he was the happiest man in the world to have a daughter such as Lola.
The first thing he gave his toddler daughter was a hammer. Together, Lola at only three feet tall and her six–foot Pop set about building furniture. They built cedar chests, a cherry bureau, four cane chairs and countless spindle top beds. Lola liked maple best, but her dad was fondest of cherry wood. In his workshop, peace mingled with the smell of sawdust and sunlit motes floating through the air. It was in the workshop where Lola first saw God. She saw God in the way her father’s strong hands clasped the end of his hammer, the way his eye focused on the nail, and the way the nail rushed to do its duty under his command. For Lola perfection lay at the end of a hammer.
She saw perfection in Father, but it confounded her to find perfection in the way he struck her mother. Red-faced and screaming Father got lost from the tranquil perfectionism at the end of his hammer. Young Lola would run to her bedroom and hide. It was those blows on Mother, her family’s nail, who rushed to do her duty under his command.
Mother Nail made the meals, washed clothes, wiped runny noses and bare bottoms—her steely determination held the family together. One day, with fists like hammers, Father killed his nail. Nail-less, Lola’s child-soul shattered and scattered.
So it was well into adulthood when Lola stood over her father’s bed as he lie dying. The old man said in a raspy voice, “I have been a bad father, a bad husband. All I have been is a failure. But, I suppose nobody’s perfect.”
“Nobody’s perfect!” Lola spewed, “Nobody’s perfect? Is that all you can say for killing my mother, tearing our family apart. I hate you! Nobody is perfect. Fuck you!”
Closing his eyes, Father said without inflection, “Hated people are the walking dead.”
Lola shrieked, “YOU grew up without a mother and dared to cry to me about it! YOU couldn’t, at the very least, let your daughter have a mother! I hate you! Nobody is perfect? Bull shit!”
No excuses returned. His silence understood fury.
Lola scanned the dark bedroom. How many years had he been out of prison? How long had he lived in this tiny room? It contained nothing but the essentials. A pair of shoes, a set of trousers, two rumpled shirts hung in a bare closet.
Other than her father, the only thing Lola recognized was the cherry bureau against the far wall. When she was about eight years old, Lola and her father built it together. That was the year she learned how to use a vibrating sander. Enthralled with the jiggly fun, Lola sanded the bureau’s surface until her eyes stung from dust and her teeth chattered from the pulsating machine.
Reluctantly, her gaze returned to her dying father. His strong hands were long gone, replaced by veiny, trembling ones. Before her was a shriveled old man, a once talented man, with a nail-less, scattered soul.
Unexpectedly, it was a hammer and all that furniture that rushed through Lola’s mind when she finally dared to look squarely at her life’s challenge. An unfamiliar kind of bravery reared up inside her and a fountain of forgiveness spurted from her eyes. Lola released her life vest of hate and let herself drown in forgiveness.
At that very moment, Lola became director of her own cosmos. Looking back at the cherry bureau with dovetailed detailing, finely planed boards, and hand-carved moldings, Lola first heard her inner Goddess. As her father’s hand dropped dead, she heard the Goddess screaming from between the finely sanded, cherry wood grain, “Everyone is perfect!”