ursula

As a post woman for the Royal Mail Ursula Slovensky knew a thing or two about love letters. Mostly because she opened every single one that passed her way. A pathologically inhibited woman with no romance of her own, she’d developed the kind of obsessive-compulsive habits one would expect in such a type. Arranging her books by emotional weight on the shelf, refusing to eat anything that touched plastic, the unshakeable belief that she must have been adopted by her brutish family, leading to a denial of them at the age of twenty-five. Which led to her further withdraw from society and a cyclic dependence on addictive substances. 

Ursula may not have married or even settled with anyone longer than a night but she had found her true love, one which inspired many an hour of yearning. 

Valium. 

Well, any benzo would do really and throughout the years she’d had affairs with them all. Ativan, Klonopin, Librium even Xanax. Though, nothing compared to two five milligrams tablets of valium every two hours, paired with a strong cup of black tea to really sweep Ursula Slovensky off her small, bunioned feet. 

Unfortunately, England had taken strong measures to make it ever so hard to attain even the smallest prescription these days. No thanks to the younger generations, she believed, making substance-intake lewdand uncouth; having nothing whatever to do with her own style…their smudged glass pipes and questionable needles. She’d seen it in movies and even in the park on her nightly walks. The children looked more love lost than she’d ever seen. But then, she didn’t look in mirrors.

Now, at a ripe and youthful seventy– finally on the precipice of her new life (her retirement as some were calling it) accompanied by her cats, her novels and her daily doses, she started to read in the papers that benzodiazepine abuse had skyrocketed. 

She supposed she couldn’t blame the young; who wouldn’t need a come down from a that newfangled debauchery? The world today was hostile. Not to mention what Ursula considered a universal addiction to the electronic screen. People spent all day gazing at clipped sentences; that left one at a loss for meaning. She presume, had she been a very devoted woman, she too would have fallen down the same path but all things considering she was a woman of the written word and not of screens– of script, of scripts, just the one script would do, really; a valium woman and she would be until the end, she prayed. She prayed. She really prayed. 

It did occur to her that she would miss reading all the mail… The balm she found in reading the desires of OTHERS. Not her own desire which she couldn’t bear…

Where would she turn for answers of love? 

To her pills she supposed, and to the means she’d need to acquire them…It would be a maze perhaps. England was cutting her off and between a drive to Spain or flight to Mexico (that place being so close to the garish American states), she’d decided her best option lay in a stint in Spain. She had a fear of drugging sniffing dogs and having to face those American armed customs officials quizzing her on the contents of her luggage.

In honor of the eve of her retirement she carried two pale pink envelopes home with her, in her satchel. Only two days before her Spanish romp and still in the brace of her smuggling routine for which gave her a sense too of belonging to a chain to connection. Her long finger noted one fat and full with what felt to the touch like hair, the other, from the same sender, thin but promising.

She relished words of devotion, descriptions of yearning, and the kind of promises people usually only made in the dark. Each letter seemed like such a very brave act, the bravest maybe. Her father had been a post man before her and had helped secure Ursula a place, her family thinking there wasn’t much else such a queer thoughtful girl could do in life. Never in the center of the action, Ursula used her large stare to linger wistfully at light coming through windowpane and make her father furious. 

“What the bloody hell is in that head of yours?!” was a common communicative technique to frighten Ursula out of silence.

“I’m just looking at Trudy trying to catch something.” Trudy was the Slovensky family’s fat white cat, who often sat with Ursula when things got loud inside and outside her head.

She didn’t know what made her keep snooping at mail when after a while she had long caught the gist. No letter had ever really shocked her. Although there had been some quite dirty ones describing acts she’d never heard of and didn’t like to imagine. Then, of course, she’d read many threats, many agonies, many promises to CHANGE, a great many promises of all sorts but no epiphany was gained by these. I’ll die for you. I’m dying for you…par for the course. Ursula had learned this early but it kept her attention nonetheless as she floated in her Valium robe around the house. 

Was love merely a flyby fiction or did it exist on the earthly plane as well? It had never been clear to her what love was and was not, never clear whether it came in form of obligation or whim. Like the habits she’d developed over years, ingrained like deep groves in river stones, a simple compulsion to OPEN and CHECK or a search for meaning in madness. Love was no doubt a madness, that she had learned early on too.

She didn’t keep the mail she snuck. She would never do that for she cared deeply that recipients receive their messages; however harsh, however ardent. Ursula simply carried them home with her, holding them over a steaming kettle while a pill dissolved under her pink tongue and her tea bag waited to be soaked. She unfolded the seal with deft fingers, sat in her favorite armchair and read them to herself. Often weeping, often, nodding with a feeling of oneness. 

Trudy the cat, long since passed, still sat in ashes on the mantel while the younger MacTaftie and Jeremy lay curled around Ursula’s slippered feet or jumped on and off her lap while she studied the words. After reflecting upon the love and the parties involved, imagining the reception and the world at large with this new love in it, she replaced the notes into their envelopes. She returned them, sealed and dry, the following day to their appropriate bin off to Germany, off to Lancaster, off off off and made sure they found their destination. She never forgot a lover and sometimes found herself reminiscing with a strange nostalgia. 

Dear Toby,

You said you’d put my picture in the passenger seat of your car and talk to it while you drove. Are you talking to me? 

I talk to you. Mostly in the kitchen. I miss you and there’s nobody to finish my plate at dinner. Except Randy, but I’ve put him on a diet because when I take him to the dog park the other humans stare at his belly and how he rolls in the dirt instead of running.

What do you do at night without me in your bed?  

Yours forever, Stirling

Her conclusions were her way of putting order into the world’s disorder. Lonely-hearts were her field of expertise and there remained fathoms to uncover. She didn’t really know what she was searching for in her prying. Too often she saw correspondence between lovers end with malice and regret. She preferred letting her imagination resolve the stories. She had found the real finales heart-wrenching and unbearable, if they appeared at all, or a slow flagging in fervor until they one day stopped. It appeared love was often lopsided and unbalanced but Ursula liked to manifest an equilibrium. She hoped the best for Stirling and every sender, that Toby had kept his promise, that he spoke to Stirling’s photo as he drove and that the dog, meanwhile, picked up the pace and ran with the pack.

Ursula was on her way to Spain by car. She took to the wheel with surprising confidence for a woman who preferred to blend into shrubbery rather than make unnecessary small talk. When not donning her grey government uniform she wore strange combinations of plant colors that stopped onlookers in their tracks, left them blinking and wondering if the old lady had been camouflaging herself in foliage. Sometimes she looked like brick. Sometimes grey stone. She had always been a subtle, painful sort of pretty. Fragile like soft paper. For her arrival to Spain she had chosen coral tunic and loose peach trousers that reminded her of the jovial envelopes one sent to a relative in need of good cheer, the color of Mediterranean sand. 

The sign read “La Rotunda de …” and Ursula let the wheel veer to the left in the direction of the drying sunflowers covering the hills along the motorway. She had missed their bloom. So like her, she thought, to arrive at their mass withering. Still, she appreciated their company as she drove, the way their faded, crispy bodies bent slightly forward, their petals drooping like long hair over tired faces.

At least she didn’t feel lost. She had studied the map for a week and had repeated the Spanish town names aloud, liking the way they made her tongue struggle to get them past her lips. Hers’ was a practiced sense of direction, not innate, a love of trudging new paths for the sake of seeing what might appear and feeling it. What would she feel now? 

Her retirement party, held in the kitchen of the central district post station, had been a mellow event with assorted cheeses, a cake and various liquors. Nobody had ever understood Ursula but she had always been there and they would probably miss her, or maybe not. Who gives much thought to tossing out an overused grey-yellow brassiere? They tried, though, to give her a good send-off, all packed inside the austere kitchen underneath a sad banner of farewell.  

Why Spain? They kept asking as they toasted to her loyalty, her meditative presence in the mail room, how she worked with such concentration it seemed at times, she wasn’t there at all. What adventures lay in wait they asked. 

“Have you got yourself a bullfighter waiting to lead you off into the sunset?” said her boss sipping his second brandy. 

“Could be.” Ursula replied with a slow smile not wanting to give anything away. Her supply of precious pharmaceuticals now dwindling dangerously close to depletion, she stroked a locket in her pocket which contained two off-white ovals. Love was a strange story.

‘Hola!’ Ursula ventured, rather more loudly than she had meant in order to get the attention of the lithe, little barman in the wilds of Spain. The buzz of the bar required that she raise her voice. Half past two o’clock in the afternoon and the place brimmed with families just starting their lunches, plucking up olives and tearing apart rolls of white bread, as old men hunched over the bar, exchanging rough sounding words with one another as they pointed at newspapers and sipped caña after caña. 

“Qué te pongo señora?” he said and she wished she’d studied languages in her free time as opposed to breaking and entering into the love life of others. The bartender’s words sounded marvelous but she had no idea what he had said. 

“Whiskey?” she said on impulse, feeling dangerous and far from her past. She spread her boney hands apart to indicate a generous pour. 

“Whiskey Grande, sí.”

“No!” She amended suddenly. “Café, por favor. Cafe” He looked only slightly confused by her outburst and nodded. Ursula almost never drank because when she did it usually led to problems. Problems like the time she’d punched her only ever boyfriend (she was eighteen) in the face and laughed and laughed until he’d punched her back and broken her nose. Problems like finding herself on a frozen park bench in Edinburgh, Scotland after a work party two nights before (in London). Problems like shitting herself while vomiting in the morning before a pre-sunrise shift with no time to shower. 

 Ursula acknowledged that a drink, like a few Valium, took the edge off the childhood traumas, her fear of eye contact, the sensation that walls closed in around her, that people wanted her snuffed, that the world could very likely fall on top of her…

But experience had shown her that alcohol threw itself right back at you one hundred fold. She only risked a drink when all her valium was GONE and life seemed a painful throbbing, hum drum thing. She knew that there was something about her and alcohol that brought her close to a peril she wasn’t feisty enough to tackle. Not like her coworker, Maureen who drank Australian wines in the evening with her Australian husband and showed up chipper albeit puffy faced the next day. Or her boss, Mark, who swirled whiskey around in a glass for an hour while his eye lids grew heavy and never imbibed at all. 

 It was only when the handsome but miniscule porter opened the room of her seaside hotel to the almost too bright sunlight through the almost too picturesque view of the sea that she realized she was entering what the young people called withdrawal. But which, for her, was a stage in the process of procuring MORE. Ursula liked to call it the get-to-it phase. She sometimes called it It’s-getting-me-too when things began to feel slanted and sordid, when new colors started to show up in the gamete, when her invisible feathers started to tickle her skin and her heart began to ache with every passing thought. Every love affair was a two-way street, and if you didn’t water the ground, there it was, shriveled foliage that needed tending which, in this case, meant finding a kindly Spanish doctor to write her a prescription…or the love dried up and she crumpled and fell to pieces. 

Benzo withdrawal, in Ursula’s experience, began with the sensation that EVERYTHING and anything was too much. Ursula unlatched her suitcase and saw her clothes now looked dowdy and stupid, embarrassing. A picture that used to hang in the hallway of her childhood home but was now lost in a dump somewhere sprang to her mind. It had showed a seaside with calm bathers lying lengthwise and a hot sun like the one on the other side of her window. Things were taking on a grainy feeling like crunched bones and nail clippings and the rubbish littering the plastic bin underneath the lining. 

Only one left.. and a long hot day loomed ahead. She pulled at her white blonde hair and saw a lamp shade angled wrong. So much so that her body started to curl into itself and she looked at the old woman she was from outside, startled, and stretched herself out as far as she could. She lay down alongside her clothes on the bed with her head buried in the sheet but once horizontal, her mind continued to conflate images, notes and textures.

Whatever happened to Megan with the blocky capital script? She’d written Gerard at least ten letters begging him to change his mind. Megan had made a mistake, she’d admitted in her posts. She loved him. She needed him. She couldn’t think of anything else but him and what he was doing without her. She was going mad with love, mad, mad. Couldn’t they start again? Couldn’t they start from the day in the square when she wore the burgundy skirt and they’d gotten drunk on white wine and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young until they finally gave in and fucked and fucked as loud as wolves despite Gerard’s houseguest. 

Only once had Ursula needed to call an ambulance for herself, fearing death. She was 42 at the time and had decided to get off everything and purify herself. A new co-worker had been chatting her up in the mornings, giving her the eye like she was tiramisu. She’d been reading fewer letters and more flash fiction so her mind was filled with possibility. Why couldn’t she have a life like them? Like the people who had reason to write to one another. I adore you. I burn for you. I live for you. I’d die for you. Knocking at doors along her route, she glimpsed through doorways and the scenes weren’t so different from her own home. Large multicolored rugs on the floor, unremarkable pictures hanging from the walls, record players, the remnants of last night’s pasta on the coffee table. Was she so aberrant as to be unlovable? 

She had signed up for aerobics, started eating macrobiotic and even bought herself a linen jumper that set off the blue in her eyes. She stopped avoiding mirrors. Lover to lover. Reflections. She could step back through the looking glass. She threw her pills in the bin with one fell swoop.

In just a week the bubble of love had all gone lumpy and pear shaped. It turned out the tiramisu sniffing man had a wife and children. More than one mistress and a complete lack of respect for the post. He had been chatting up women in their homes on his routes, and forgetting entire bundles of urgent mail at the bottom of his bags. He was a loser.

By the time she realized her fantasy future promised nothing, she’d gone four days cold turkey; living mostly on beansprouts and steamed broccoli. Her nervous system could barely distinguish feelings from objects ‘disappointed’ looked very much like a coat hanger and her cat was lifeforce itself taunting her with its paw. That’s when the ambulance arrived. Directly after her discharge, a small prescription phoned to the pharmacy, she returned to her routine of letter pilfering, drug seeking, and removing herself as the subject from sentences of love.

She’d learned her lesson. Don’t get tremulous, yet, she told herself. There was plenty of time. She splashed her face with water and took one child-sized Absolut vodka from the mini bar, just in case. Yearning was beginning to take over her long frame like an unknown houseguest’s smell. She was being driven forward toward an elusive goal, toward fresh English air and a home scented by her cats (now being watched be a kindly neighbor lady until her return.) She wished she could write a letter to whom she yearned. Dear somebody, help. Just a little help. Plenty of round ovals. A treasure chest and where one might imagine gold coins, pills. I am turning dragon again. Help. Yours truly I think, Ursula.

Doctor Roberto Puentes. Calle Demasiado parati 1. She had found him online and according to the reviews he spoke perfect English and what was more, he didn’t ask many questions. Ursula realized it had been nearly 18 hours since she’d slept and she couldn’t remember if she’d eaten more than some almonds and olives in the bar. Her hand fondled the bottle of vodka in her purse and she tried to redirect her focus to the shimmering surroundings of the country. A woman wearing bright green overalls and a white bikini top underneath, pink sandals and a thick long braid passed her with a whiff of perfume and the aroma of recent sex. Everyone’s beauty struck Ursula as otherworldly, rich like chocolate but frightening in its self-assurance. 

Seated in the waiting room she took out the bottle and contemplated its petite size and lack of color. She felt like a giant in the chair. Not human at all and entirely out of place. Where did she belong? Why had she come here and left her nearly-made bed at all? Better to die under the covers? How had she ended up so very alone? Desperately alone. Chemical companionship now seemed pathetic and unworthy of penmanship. If only her cats could write. If her father hadn’t hated her. If she knew how to hold herself up like the strings of a puppet. How ghastly all these images, grey and chopping at her in violent strokes.

The face of the woman who’d checked her in, speaking to her in English with a look of pity, yes pity, looked down at her desktop. The poor old Englishwoman who couldn’t choke out a sentence. Coming here to beg drugs. Her whole life she’d received those looks but never more clearly than now. Ursula, the pitiful postwoman, lurching about the road like a zombie and no better than the children she saw in the park and the men at the bars and in stairwells smelling of piss. She knew in her heart that those were the people she’d write to if she could write. The only ones who would understand her desire a lessening of discomfort and aloneness. They had much more in common with them than any lover but no fixed address perhaps. 

Dear Pity, I too seek obliteration from a world of so many colors and nowhere to dump all the trash so we have to drown it in the ocean like people drown animals and babies because the world is too full and too hot and nobody really knows the correct route to take or where they ought to go, or even has time to concentrate on writing a proper letter. 

She opened the bottle and drank it right there in front of the lovely woman at the wait desk who surely had a bullfighter or two vying for her affections. Suddenly, Ursula’s body felt trembling and cool and hot and the room bursting with white sunbeams. The liquor reminded her of fires on a hearth and pieces of a puzzle finding their way together. She would see the doctor soon and, who knew! He would summon her dangling a red cloth so she’d hit her target, how silly for a doctor to swagger and sparkle. Swirls of letters filled her mind, whirls of possibility as she drove onward, antlers exposed. 

(Newest piece of fiction. Written, on and off, during September – December 2021)