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!