Just a plain beam. The window is dusty and greasy at the same time. The rays penetrate. They do their bright physics on the counter top. Crumbs seam clean. It all seams cleaner when the sun is in the kitchen.

Her hands are small. The big screwdriver makes her feel six, though she understands, masters the simple thing she is doing. She removes four tiny screws. She replaces the battery in a worn echo pedal.

The microwave clock says zero. There's not much time. She looks at her watch, the dishes, papers on the table. Time is running ahead of her. It's time to get ready for work.

Ivy drops what she is doing.

On the other side of the subway the sun is so much lower. Going to work at 5:30 P.M. makes it seem like the sun is in Brooklyn only, at least in the winter. Summer will bring fingers of sun onto the bar and give it that Brooklyn kitchen feeling. Maybe that will be a relief. Maybe that will bring back her enthusiasm for 10th Street Tavern. She is now, nonplused.

Ivy hates poetry. Hate is a strong word. Is it? What's the use in hating poetry?

There's always someone writing poetry--a busboy or a customer--always writing on something uncustomary, though paper's as plentiful as ice. As they can interrupt themselves to make every twentieth word resplendent, they can interrupt her. She's scraping wax off the bar, she's making things un- sticky, but no, there's the busboy, scrawny, x-junky, made her sick of New York before she even got here. Of course! He's written it on a napkin. Oh, there are just poems. poems everywhere!

"Do you have a minute? This won't take five minutes. Just a second. Do you have a second?"

She says, "Wal--"

Wallace says, "I couldn't get this out of my mind. The words were just flooding. I had to stop. Do you mind? Can I share this with you? Okay. Sunlight--"

"Wallace!" She has stunned him. "Can I tell you something? When you read your poetry to me it feels like you're taking a pint of blood. I don't want to discourage you from writing, just don't share it with me. This is my job. This isn't workshop. I can't explain it any better than that."

"Fine."

The air is dominated by the essence of fried food, a humidity of 100% pure canolla oil. She lights a cigarette and is half-surprised not to set the air aflame. Martin, the cook, leans over the service bar, winks and touches one nostril.

"No thank you," she tells him.

She sees he has an empty coffee mug and bends into the cooler for a corona. He hands her the mug and she fills it with beer, below the level of the bar. She chucks the bottle in with the recycling and he retreats.

At booth 33 Wallace is reading his poem to the new waitress. Ivy glares at them while slicing limes. Her jaw hurts. She notices she is grinding her teeth. She exhales. She turns a lime on the cutting board. As she cuts, an ash falls from her cigarette.

"F**k,"she says with the cigarette in her mouth. She looks down at the ash and lime. She looks up and her reflection is there in the window, cigarette hanging, the skin is dark under her eyes. She looks like a drug addict. She looks like she lives in a cellar and eats nothing but cheese curls and snack cakes. She is holding her breath again.

"Ivy!"

"What."

"The kitchen wants beer."

She has terrible dreams, and yearns for more. She sleeps as late as possible, willing herself back on the scene--to change the ending, to turn and face what pursues. A heroin of this sleepy frontier, she is less eager to involve herself with what is exterior, such as dishes. What are other examples? Laundry. Bathing. Wiping her ass very carefully after a particularly liquid expulsion. This is a harsh characterization of her. This is unforgiving.

There were these honeysuckle bushes, when she was little. They grew against the brick side of a giant alcove which housed the concrete stairs of her apartment building. Honeysuckle leaves have a subtle thickness; they suggest texture without really possessing it and so feel like magic between the thumb and forefinger. Close against the brick wall, little dirt-floor caverns were made by the backside of this row of bushes. It was dark in there. Of course, it was always cool. It was utterly isolated and her favorite place to be. It was calm and there was no possibility that she would be seen.

Later, in High School, she wrote a poem about this place, how there was a patch of violets in this sunless cavity, and how she didn't understand what made them grow, how they turned their heads to an imperceptible sun and grew as though they were in all the light.

That poem won her The Laurel Crown, and title of Poet Laureate for the entire region, which is not just one district, but a whole cluster of districts in Northwestern Illinois.

This made her viable as an applicant to a small liberal arts college that had a particular admissions agenda--to recruit students who will win prestigious awards for Creative Writing.

She'd been very busy having sex in high school and would not have graduated if not for her early acceptance into this celebrated college. She was failing every class, and had failed so many classes in previous years that she didn't have one credit to spare. She needed to pass every class in order to commence.

She went to school on Senior Ditch Day. She went to each class and told each teacher, "I am failing your class because I have not attended and I have not done the work. I did not participate, so I did not learn what was taught. Still, I have a chance to get out of here and go someplace that's better for me--where I will either succeed or fail. Tell me what I have to do, that I can do, that will make you feel good about giving me a D, otherwise I will have to call my admissions counselor and say that I'm sorry I cannot accept your invitation to attend classes in the fall; I have failed high school; I will get my GED and remain a grocery bagger here in Rolling Meadows, Illinois."

Her first year of college, she won the Seymour Prize for her short story, "This is Narcissism in the Present Tense." Her second year, she won the same prize for "More Myths about Me."

She won prizes like these so regularly that it was understood, all others were competing for Second Place. She wore this easily, for she was completely arrogant.

No one can truly escape forgiveness, so why be afraid to say she was a lazy, arrogant, narcissistic sex addict with bad hygiene and a low tolerance for reality--and may still be to this day?

She wakes up with an itchy pain in her lips, like her mouth has fallen asleep. They must be blue. It was a nightmare. She remembers what a friend had disclosed to her-- his fear of a phantom woman with a toothed vagina. Ivy met this woman in her nightmare, tried to enjoy her and was bitten on the mouth. True horror. She feels she may have been wrong to, in her dream, climb through that basement window and crawl upon that naked Spanish woman on the cool concrete floor. Worse, she fears the bite may cause an aversion to behavior like this in future dreams.

Sunday night's side work is the worst. It's because there's no business and plenty of time--plenty of time to pull eight cases of loose bottles out of the reach-in, and invent ways to liberate from its bottom a week's depth of coagulated milk and cranberry juice, scooping it with a rocks glass, soaking it into c-fold towels, as the beer warms and one's ass protrudes. She looks like she's just legs and an ass, like one of those lawn decorations of the fat, quaint woman pulling weeds in her garden.

"Excuse me." A man's voice.

She withdraws from the cooler and turns with a smile which truly says, "You're the reason I am here."

"I hear this place has the best margaritas." He smiles. His hair is thin and showing a lot of scalp. His shoulders are very relaxed. He is possessed of a stillness--he must have been seated for several minutes before saying "excuse me."

"I make the best margaritas," she says.

I make the best margaritas, she thinks. What the hell does that mean? Between me and a syphilitic gorilla, I make the best margaritas. In a world where every other bartender is dripping puss, I make the best margaritas.

"I'm glad." He takes off his glasses and sets them on the bar.

"Let me tell you how you like them," she says. Pause. Smile. "Straight up, very cold, light salt, top shelf."

"That'll work."

She's liberal with the ice as she prepares the drink, but withholds every sliver as she pours. A fog of citrus descends in a tornado pattern in the chilled martini glass.

She tries not to mind the forest of warming bottles that surround her behind the bar, and chooses a task that does not require her to dive headfirst into a tank of slop, pointing her adequate bottom at the face of her paying customer. She polishes the bottles on the call shelf. A splash of well gin on a bar towel makes them practically stellar. She's the Martha Stewart of tasteful bartending.

Martin appears at the service bar, so she goes to him.

"Are you hungry?" he asks.

"No, but I will be later."

"I got nice salmon tonight. I save for you."

"Thank you, baby." She smiles. "Did you ask Wallace if he's hungry?"

"I don't care if he is," Martin grumbles. "You look tired. Tired?"

"Maybe." She knows that maybe is a ridiculous answer. She is either tired or she isn't. Can't she assess herself?

Martin sniffs abruptly and puts his hand on his breast pocket. He raises his eyebrows.

"Maybe later," she says.

"Okay, maybe later on. We will be so bored tonight." Martin goes back to the kitchen.

"You do that?" asks the margarita drinker.

"What?" Ivy wets her towel with Crystal Palace and takes down the XO for a shine.

The margarita man puts his hand on his breast pocket, sniffs and points toward the kitchen with his eyes.

"Not really." Ivy knows that not really is another ridiculous answer.

"Not as a general rule," she says and this is worse.

"Well," he begins. Now he turns his head toward the door. She thinks that he's given up on her. "Does that mean, sometimes?" He's chewing a stir stick, head still turned.

Ivy leans toward him. She waits for him to face her. "I don't know what that means," she says. "I think I'm going insane."

"That's not a problem," he smiles. He sips his drink. "I mean don't be alarmed. Really, that's a good first step."

"A first step toward what?" she asks him. The beer is an ever-warming obstacle course behind the bar. She will continue cleaning the cooler in a few minutes, she decides, feeling that she is an ass on sticks one way or the other.

"I bet it drove you nuts," he says, "when you were a kid and everyone told you that you're problem is that you think too much."

"You're right." She's not surprised. It's an easy thing to guess.

"You thought, what the hell am I supposed to do with that? Is that some kind of advice? Am I supposed to think less?"

"I did think all those things. But, somehow I took their advice anyway."

"Most people think less than when they were children. Especially in their twenties," he winks.

"I'm in my thirties."

"Oh, well then." He pushes his empty glass toward her. "I'll take another one like this."

"Still," he continues, "you have a nasty monologue going on in your head. Don't ask how I can tell. It's what the self- help people call stinkin' thinkin' and there's something to it. Your problem isn't that you think too much, it's that you think too much crap--no offense. Take fruits and vegetables, for instance. As long as they're not contaminated with some horrible industrial toxins, you can eat as much as you want. You really can't eat too many fruits and vegetables. But you can certainly eat too much crap."

She just stares at him. She thinks what he says is true. She doesn't wonder what gave her away because she thinks it's obvious that she's not quite right.

"You're mean to yourself, inside your head--that's what I'm saying. I am being very presumptuous," he tells her. "But what's the risk in being presumptuous? I could be wrong, that's all."

"I agree with you." She presents his second margarita. "So," she tries to sound appealing, "tell me more about me."

"No," he says, modestly. "You tell me something about me."

"You're 46. You're a Pisces. You weigh 185 lbs. You have never been married, but you have been engaged. You're bisexual. You're parents are divorced. You live far away from the rest of your family. You love the arts, but you don't work in the arts. You work in a field that you consider to be relatively benign, which provides you with means without encroaching on your real life, your private life. You're probably a writer. You have an unfinished screenplay under your bed."

"Well, it's a stage play. It's in my bottom dresser drawer. I weigh 180 lbs and my parents never divorced, but my mother passed away." He sips. "The rest is true."

"Really," Ivy smiles. "A stage play?"

He nods.

"I love the theatre," she says. "That's why I never go."

He laughs. "That's a good one." He looks far away and his voice falls, "That's very good." He drifts.

Ivy takes her shoes off in the hall. She wears white socks to work. Someone once told her that white socks don't get as stinky as dark socks. This made no sense to her, but she's worn white socks to work ever since.

There is so much to do now. She has to get her key into the door. She has to open the door. She has to take off her coat, hang up her bag, feed the cats. She has to pee, check the voice mail. All of this burdens her, eats time and stands between Ivy and her loves--the window seat, her guitar, her ashtray, lighter and her cigarettes.

The metal gate is pulled down over the entrance to the bodega across the street. There is the squawk of a garbage truck down the street, the faded howl of speeding cars displacing air along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and rustling of her troublemaker cats in the kitchen. The room is smokey, dim and cool. She exhales.

Her fingers are like perfect teenage gymnasts. They stretch, contort, hold, flip and land square on the neck of her guitar. How can you expect it of little children, yet they love the strength, the power, the control. They make it look so easy. They have squeezed and tightened and pushed on effort until it is an invisible thing. All that's left is music.

She plays until the sun comes up.

©1999 R. Bouchard