Touch, by Sherry Abaldo

Grainstack (Sunset), by Claude Monet (France) 1891

​Touch
 
Rubes maybe but not barbarians, we never touched a painting – or a frame, or wall, or corner. We barely held each other’s hands hot from the college bus. But in that white cream corner of the MFA, our noses almost touched the Monets. Two Rouen Cathedrals, two haystacks. I grooved to gothic. You preferred haystacks. So ethereal, so dreamy, lifetimes away from Maine bales we both once carried. Mostly you. I always managed to get stung. Allergic to rural. Madding itch of hives and cuts from hay on our soft forearms, up and down where you would slit your wrists if you meant business. 
 
It was the go-go ‘80s. Never take off your pearls. The label checking, quick Lauren scented arm around your neck to check your inner collar. I wore Lanz nightgowns every night, we all did at a certain women’s college, except when you drove down from UMO, slipped mine off. 
 
You and I could never be Tom and Daisy careless people. At house parties in the city, scions bit at girls’ pearl necklaces, and if the pearls were real: nothing, teeth on nacre, maybe a kiss, maybe a bite. If the pearls were artificial: the string breaks. Pearls spill everywhere like milk drops. Complete humiliation for the girl. 
 
A string of real pearls has a knot between each one, I learned while I learned Hardy, Plato, Keats. Protection against rupture. My string was real. Worn like a gun. I remember telling you what tache meant, when you said My God you can see every brush mark Monet made! I said tache means touch. It also can mean stain. We could not believe the hush and height and quiet of the museum, nor the starry dirty pleasures of the city we’d find later. How the painted field resembled twilight on the ocean. How the haystack evoked a burning house.  

Sherry Abaldo

Sherry Abaldo’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Ekphrastic Review, Rattle, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She has written scripts for award-winning shows on PBS, The History Channel, and more. As researcher, she worked on the nonfiction WWII book The Dangerous Shore, forthcoming from William Morrow. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and USC film school. A native Mainer, she lives with her husband Mario in Las Vegas, NV, where she wanders in the desert and drinks a lot of Earl Grey tea. More at sherryabaldo.com.