Writing prompt: The visitors
Image from promotional materials for 2005 animated
film, Kontrol
Eskape.
Daniel came with a backpack full of canned cat food
and Max, a fluffy grey tabby artfully splotched with
patches of orange, on a leash. As he kissed my cheek,
his toothbrush nudged me in the chest. It was tucked
into his front shirt pocket alongside a container of
floss and a ballpoint pen. He had a change of clothes
in the car and had packed a tent, too, just in case.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” was the
first thing out of his mouth. Max, unleashed,
threaded my legs and dashed into the living room.
Later we found a small disc of cat urine on the floor
by the ficus, Max’s lament, his only accident.
I made a crimini mushroom omelet with muenster cheese
and served it with a side of crisp potatoes roasted
with whole shallots and rosemary sprigs. When Dan
emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, he
opened a bottle of Pinot. We sat in eating in silence
until the second glass, when he rolled up his left
sleeve and showed me the marks, a neat imprint of
fingers wrapped around bicep.
“Eric’s at it again.”
His boyfriend was a brute, a nasty sort who was
attractive if you didn’t know his back story, didn’t
know he was a sweet manipulator that could turn
maniacal. Daniel turned and lifted his shirt,
revealing an archipelago of bruises on his lower
back, a long bloodied scratch across his spine. He
never had a mark above the clavicle or below the
groin: Eric was strictly covert.
“I forgot to take out the recycling.”
Suppressing a sigh, I reached for his hand, tamping
down my guilty urge to blame the victim, give him a
hard time for sticking around with beautiful Eric,
the work acquaintance I’d set him up with. Eric of
the deceivingly kind brown eyes and silken hands, of
the long fingers of bendable steel and the
high-pitched staccato laugh, a machine-gun guffaw
that was as hairtrigger as his rage. I didn’t want to
know about it, didn’t want to provide sympathetic
catharsis.
“I forgot to take out the recycling, so he dragged me
to the bin.”
“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”
A story of kicks by wingtip, recycling carefully
sorted and dutifully delivered to the curb, Daniel’s
attempts to keep his expression flat and his
apologies genuine – Eric wanted simple obedience and
sincere contrition, not a melodramatic man-beating
scene. Last time it was about dry cleaning, though
neither of us can remember whether the issue was
overstarching (Eric has very sensitive skin) or
Daniel’s forgetfulness, the shirts that weren’t
picked up in time for the conference.
“He’s so . . . quiet about it, have I told you that?
He doesn’t yell or scream. But his face is
terrifying, Janine. It looks like it’s going to
collapse on itself. Someday his brow will fold into
his mouth and he will reveal himself to be the alien
I know he is. Max always runs under the guest bed
before anything happens. He’s my early warning
system.”
Daniel took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I
knew tonight wasn’t going to be the beginning of his
redemption story, just another painful, repetitive
chapter, the time before the revelation. He would be
back there maybe even tonight. The reunions were the
best part of this, weren’t they? Max would stay with
me this time and I would stay out of it.
I leaned
back and grabbed another bottle of wine from the
rack.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling
Stone.
The centerpiece of Thanksgiving
dinner was a rockfish one year. Kevin had caught it
himself, straight from the Chesapeake Bay. Mom
stuffed it with breadcrumbs spiked with chopped
fennel and onion, and there were mashed potatoes,
cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans on the
side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about
politics as usual. I wish I could go back and capture
those conversations, remember the deep level jokes
and high level discussions. Almost any dinner with my
mother and Kevin was devoted to real conversation and
humor, sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was
the closest we ever came to feeling like a family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin got
sick, when he was just starting his PhD program at
Penn, and Augie the collie was a puppy. I had taken
the train from DC to Wilmington to visit and things
were unusually smooth, no arguments, very little
baiting. We ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in
the candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled with
breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil, garlicky and herby
and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin had
taken a year off from college in 1966 after being
busted for selling marijuana (a setup, he claimed)
and he headed off to California, hitchhiked down the
coast. He talked about Dylan going electric,
mentioned the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles
devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones fans.
There was talk of high school dances, the moves and
the moments. The radio was playing music from that
era and he and Mom started to slow dance as I watched
from the table.
What do you do when a family
culture dies? When a powerful personality disappears?
The center did not hold. We’re still trying to create
our own gravity.
Everything around me remains the same
And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.
I'm putting this experience to bed now.
Photo by PhineasX.
Gusts of words swirl around me that
week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk?
Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She
said it was the first thing that popped into her
head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my
stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s
house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the
blast of televised football and the scraping of
forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent
throat-clearing sounding a note of general
disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the
nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty
abdomen. Flat as a pancake.
On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds
pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to
Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the
stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway,
props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very
tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with
more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a
laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d
jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the
empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the
other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves
goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little
House.
Smells become part of the background of a place, as
invisible as the color of the ceiling or the
punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard.
You forget how a house smells, forget it practically
the moment you close the door. The stale air of the
Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is
the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and
formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a
canister of Lysol and scour the room with an
antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they
are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel
of the place, moving furniture and taking down
photographs.
When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the
main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the
sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial.
An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon
and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the
dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach
for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk
back to the Little House clutching my glass of
whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful,
deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as
though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After
locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink
is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing.
Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I
begin to cry.
On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my
mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is
cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with
the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple
sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the
paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington
News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the
car into gear and backs out of the driveway.
Everything around me remains the same.
Writing prompt: Streetsweeper
Photograph by Jane
Underwood.
Janine had been passing him on her
way to the drugstore for weeks now. She never went
into the diner – too much saturated fat, not enough
green stuff, unless the dye they used in their mint
chocolate chip ice cream counted – and, to be honest,
she had other reasons not to go in, too.
Ever since returning home to pack up her mother,
she’d been stepping inadvertently into the past. The
town itself seemed stuck in a time warp, with all
that neon and the thriving Mom and Pop stores (who
would have thought that northern New Jersey was so
retro?). It was the kind of place where people
stayed, aged in place. The pharmacist at the corner
drug store was a high school acquaintance, a former
football cheerleader who was brainier than anyone
knew. The guy who pumped her gas was the brother of
Janine’s best friend from elementary school. The
clerk working at the library circulation desk was the
person who introduced Janine to marijuana, that first
secretive toke during a school trip into New York.
Janine was tired of going through the dance of
friendly interrogation. Over time she developed a
willful blindness and only saw the path ahead of her.
That was difficult enough, considering the state of
her mother's apartment, the tangled and rotting
neurons clogging her mind. This time he saw her.
“Janine! Janine Rickenbacher?”
It was Tommy. In the same job he’d had since high
school, handyman/janitor for Zorba's. Some things
never change, but Tommy had. He’d hardened, his eyes
had darkened a shade, were brassy and brittle. He
took off a glove and reached for her, his hand
calloused, the fingernails bitten to nubs.
What haven't I told you?
I let the
first
U.S. punk compilation slip out of my hands. Album
cover from Rate
Your Music.
Jean of
Jean’s Musings
– a lovely blog that
I recommend highly – has passed a meme my way, a
request to list five things that you might not
know about me. Given how much I’ve revealed here,
that’s a tall order, but I think I can dredge up
some obscure facts.
*I once had a Secret
security
clearance. The think tank I worked for
did a lot of work for the defense department and
the library was responsible for the classified
document collection. Getting the clearance was
nerve-wracking, as was the proximity to potential
national secrets. It was a relief to leave it
behind.
*Although we do have a television, I don't watch it
(this despite the fact that we've had mysterious
cable access in our last two houses).
*Punk music was the soundtrack of my life for a long
time. I knew my now-husband was a good match after we
watched a movie that included the song Viva Las
Vegas. As we were leaving the theater I told him
“Every time I hear that song I …” He finished the
sentence, “think of the Dead
Kennedys version?” That’s right. Ahh,
love.
*I got my license at 25 (or was that 26?), but
I don’t
drive.
You wouldn’t want me to. Trust me.
*Despite a lifelong allergy to cats, I have never
lived without at least one kitty, except for a brief
pet-free period in college and graduate school. They
are worth the asthma, the itchy eyes, the mounds of
tissues.
An extra fact: I’ve got some recipes in the Nov/Dec
issue of Vegetarian
Times,
along with a short profile in the contributers
column. Go to your newsstand or local library and
take a look. I'll be putting up more information
on the Food Writing
section eventually.
If you have your own five facts, I'd love to read
them.
And for your listening pleasure, Viva Las Vegas!
The kindness of other bloggers
And if all this weren’t wonderful enough, Ken Armstrong of Ken's Writing Stuff gave me a copy of his recently published play, “The Moon Cut Like a Sickle,” after I correctly answered the question “What lady links ‘Mack the Knife’ with ‘From Russia with Love’"? Even though I cheated and used Google instead of actual knowledge, he was kind enough to send me a copy, all the way from Ireland to the far reaches of the continental U.S. Ken’s blog is a mix of movie reviews and stories, infused with optimism and humor. It's on my Google reader and it should be on yours, too.
Finally, the awards (and if I’ve missed one, I apologize. Please let me know). I am so happy that such a great group of writers and thinkers like what I am doing here. This time I'm passing each award on to another blogger who can do with it what they wish. Of course, the blogs below are only an example of the good stuff out there in the blogosphere and there are many that I read regularly and love that I haven't listed here.
Thank you, Geoffrey and Lidian! I'm passing this one on to Candy of Inside Candy.
Thank you, Lidian and Maitri! I'm passing this one on to Just Bob of the Essence of Bobness.
Thank you Lidian, Maitri, and Dori! I'm passing this one on to Karen of The Pitfalls of Life and Five Little Kids Named Larrow.
Thank you, Candy! I'm passing this one on to Koe at The Half-Life of Linoleum.
Thank you, Maitri! I can't single out any one blog here without feeling like I'm missing someone, so I officially pass this on to any blog on my blogroll.
Thank you, Judy! I am passing this one on to Lydia of Writerquake.
Next post: Is there anything I haven't told you?
Inner battle
Grappling with myself.
Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa
collection of my father and
stepmother.
The things I am supposed to be
doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they
sometimes control me. They become obligations
body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots,
the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should
not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.
This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst
(except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid,
dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry
around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff
that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t
change and must make right in my mind in order to
live a full life. It’s been working, for the most
part. I’m letting go.
Yes, I have complained about my current relationships
with my parents, have brought up marital discord from
the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in
the context of grappling with painful memories,
revealing old scars to healing light.
But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the
reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she
is practically a saint. She is my father’s total
champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him.
My father has treatment-resistant depression, a
condition he has been grappling with from the time he
entered college. It was because of depression that he
stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on
many different varieties of medication; he’s been
through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive
therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the
process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the
troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.
There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity.
Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has
developed debilitating back pain and can barely get
out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically
housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken
on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all,
my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive,
never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and
vacuumer of a four bedroom house.
Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying
around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am
invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my
second son, she talked about it being my first baby
(perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because
– stupidly, since I really should let go of this one,
but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got
married to my father two days before my fourteenth
birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails
on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be
feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know.
Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some
way. I don’t know.
My father loves me, but he has not been a very good
father. It's just the truth. Four years of every
other weekend visits does not a good father make.
Financial support for one's child – which I do
appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either,
though certainly there are many absentee fathers out
there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation
for distrust early. A little recognition of this past
and his part in it would make a huge difference.
After he read
the blog,
he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've
never talked about it. But what about her?
I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many
ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for
days. I'm late with birthday and father's day
greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our
travel plans to see them and have been absent for
multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas,
a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt
floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a
surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.
What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you
do when you can’t talk to someone about your
feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring
how I feel?
So many questions. Does anyone have answers?
(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I
have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge.
That's the next post.)
Writing prompt: talismans
Image from The Heart
Chronicles. "Vintage" (presumably long
dead) rabbit's foot from the Etsy shop
marytofts: antiques and
curiosities.
Do the talismans protect you? They
do not.
Do they
bring on a creative rush, make you joyous when you
are bereft, give you the courage and faith to love
when your heart is stony and withdrawn? They do not.
Then why carry them around? Why write on the bathroom
mirror each morning “I will have a great day,” in
perky cursive with mauve lip liner if it doesn’t
really work? The coffee will overflow, the bus will
be late, someone will eat your sandwich from the
communal refrigerator.
I knew a girl who used to carry around a rabbit’s
foot – lucky for her, unlucky for the rabbit, the
joke goes. Whenever she was called on in class, she
would pull the foot out of her pocket, would worry
worry worry the soft fur. Later she dropped out,
ended up as an exotic dancer in that sex shop strip
by the airport. Some luck.
I’ve opened umbrellas in the house, I’ve stayed on
the thirteenth floor, I’ve watched frozen as a black
cat crosses my path. Still here to tell about it, and
to say: luck is often random. Sometimes we bring
things upon ourselves, the good and the bad, we court
the accident or flirt with the firing. Or we pave the
way for happiness, work hard, make intelligent
choices, drop the bad friends.
It’s not quite a crap shoot. It isn’t hocus pocus.
But if your talismans bring comfort, well, that’s ok.
"When are you due?"
I was not going to be that girl. I
was not that girl, marked by pregnancy, announcing my
mistake and stupidity to everyone. Most of my friends
didn’t know about it. Even my new boyfriend was
clueless, in more ways than one: all that direct
contact with my ever-rounding form and he never asked
a question. I was going to spend my last trimester in
hiding, living with my father and stepmother.
Everyone swallowed the story, my need for a little
time away.
It seemed to be working, the baggy
clothes campaign, the stony denial, but one incident
brought doubt. A friend, Lynne, and I were out
skipping school at the usual place, a shopping mall
near school. We stopped in a boutique where Lynne
bought a pair of earrings. As she was ringing up the
sale, the salesclerk gave me a friendly glance.
“When are you
due?” she asked.
I blushed. She blushed. We were
both briefly, awkwardly silent, before the clerk
quickly covered for me. “Oh, no! You’re too young!
I’m so sorry!”
Thank you, lady.
Later, at the food court, I asked
Lynne “Am I getting fat? Do I look pregnant to you?”
gently patting my belly, camouflaged by loose-fitting
clothing. Lynne dipped a French fry in ketchup, gave
me a quick once over. “You look fine,” she said, and
shoved the fry in her mouth. That was
that.
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the
importance of the notebook. It’s one of those old
black and white composition books, barely held
together by 45-year old glue and stitching, the edges
of the pages the color of dead oak leaves, cured by
time. An artifact, a little piece of Kevin,
half-filled with poems of late adolescence, poems
that he probably wrote in his senior year of high
school. They are short and generally angry, each one
typewritten and stapled or taped to the front of a
page.
If I could explain the importance of the notebook,
maybe I could explain the importance of Kevin. How
can someone who tried to destroy me, who battered my
mother emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was
extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like him, a man
who pushed himself out of a childhood of emotional
and physical abuse and formed a self out of will and
ashes. He was a poet, a self-taught carpenter, a
working class intellectual. In the midst of
fatal
illness,
he completed his dissertation and received a PhD.
He was also so wickedly funny that my mother and I
still laugh when we remember his stories and
jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that
knife-like wit. He was an active participant in the
neglect that led to my pregnancy at sixteen. Whenever
he saw hypocrisy or hidden motive – which was often –
he skewered the hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His
ability to see the darkness in himself and others
never took into account the overwhelming goodness we
each have, the lightness that makes up most of who we
are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose cruelty and
black math was caused by a childhood of pain and
anger, but it probably helps that he is off stage
now, six years dead. It was a long and painful exit.
Kevin didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized
for six months, to have his body whittled down to 80
skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve to lose his
ability to swallow and sometimes to breathe
unassisted. No one deserves what happened to Kevin.
But that time of suffering was also a time to make
peace. I was at the hospital for hours almost every
day, there for both him and my mother, keeping
company, being a second set of eyes to make sure no
mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to show
that we all have the ability to be good. Even him.
Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing that
paragraph about how I benefited from Kevin’s
suffering leaves me with a dirty feeling, as though I
relished the opportunity to be redeemed through his
pain. It wasn’t like that. I was there because I
wanted to be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched and
stretched from early morning into late afternoon. A
small group of family gathered in his hospice room
and listened to him wind down, heard the silent
spaces grow between each breath, watched his heart
flutter out from under his ribcage. Outside,
daffodils were pushing through once-frozen ground and
the forsythia was in bloom. The world was coming to
life again as we sat and waited for death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed by dead
quiet. The dog broke the silence with a bark, my
mother reached for me and Kevin’s son, held us and
cried. Mom later said she felt Kevin’s energy leave
his body, had an image of him walking along a river
path against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie by
his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me for my
presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had this time," and
immediately regretted it. What was I saying? Those
six months of dying were great? What a wonderful
opportunity for me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the pressure
of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful and loving
presence. Don’t be hard on yourself. You
were there for me. Thank you.
Then he was gone.
Two
Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
November's blog: The Virtual Dime Museum
This month's featured blog,
the Virtual Dime
Museum,
is a shift from personal history --
October’s Melindaville
-- to popular
history, offering a change of pace for November.
The Virtual Dime Museum provides a peek at
advertisements, news stories, and sundry
entertainments from the mid-1800s into the early 20th
century. It is full of oddities and bizarre medical
concoctions, sideshows and haunted houses. Writer
Lidian, born and raised in New York City and now
living in Canada, has created an entertaining and
well-written three-ring circus of pop history,
Brooklyn and New York history, and Victorian pop
culture.
Whether it’s digging up an 1896 item about a skeleton hand found in Flatbush or profiling Victorian fascinations such as the animated bust, Lidian brings a sense of humor to the Virtual Dime Museum. Her interests in genealogy and history combined with her mad research and writing skills results in a diverting and dryly funny read. And if you like your pop history a little more recent, check out her other blog of kitsch and camp, Kitchen Retro.
It's all over until next year
The kid, in non-Sam Kinison mode.
Soon to come: a change of pace with November's blog of the month and another set of recipes in Vegetarian TImes!