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!