The darkness to come

corncloseup
I sent Paulie to the bar for another round.

He cornered me early, started talking when I walked into the fire hall and had not let up. A perpetual cigarette dangled out of his mouth and his conversational style was mumbling ramble pierced by awkward silence and intense stares into the crowd. Whenever he made a point, one or both of his arms shot out and swept the air around us clean. Invariably, this resulted in contact, usually with the thick hand or arm of someone beefy and bearded (there were many at the Saturday night dance) whose back tensed up before he turned around. But everyone knew Paulie, and the bearded men laughed and thumped him on the back, hearty gestures which almost knocked him over, before they belched in our faces or leered at me. Finally one of Paulie’s arms landed on my shoulders. He let it hang there, limp and damp. I sent him to the bar to give him something else to do. And then Steven walked in.

Two weeks ago, I slipped out of Steven's truck without saying goodbye. I unplugged my phone and spent evenings into late night on the tiny back porch reading Russian novels and swatting mosquitos, sometimes burning incense as a cleansing ritual. I was leaving for Illinois soon and needed to make a clean break. But there he was in front of me, radiating heat, his faded jeans held up by a cracked belt, his plaid shirt blurred by years of wear. He looked hungry. Lonely. I plunged my free hand into my pocket and gripped the other tightly around my empty plastic cup.

Steven moved closer, smelling fresh as the bay in the morning, his familiar hip almost touching mine. He opened his mouth to speak when Paulie floated back from the bar, a white ghost in a crowd of sweating men in sleeveless shirts and women with wrinkled butterfly tattoos nestled in sagging cleavage.

Blame it all on my roots, showed up in boots and ruined your black tie affair. The band launched into Friends in Low Places. The lead singer's eyes closed as he gripped the neck of the mike. He was pigeon-toed and the points of his cowboy boots intersected at the mike stand. Steven grinned and reached for my hand. As we twirled away, Paulie tipped one beer into his mouth and then another and vanished.

What do you do when the feeling lingers, when someone's touch is like fever against your skin? I was already lightheaded, Steven's hands firm against the small of my back, his chin against my cheek. The song was background to the buzzing in my head. As the band wrapped it up, Steven led me through the crowd and out the door. Outside, it was quiet. We felt no need to speak. The waning gibbous moon was bright, heavy as an egg, the cool air a reminder that fall was imminent. We walked arm in arm to his truck and kissed against the driver's side door until he opened it. I accepted my fate.

The wind tangled through the truck, the fields rustled as we rushed by, and when I shivered Steven pulled me closer. The corn was August-melancholy, still green but going brown at the edges. Spotlit by our high beams, it shuddered in anticipation of
the harvest, of the darkness to come. With a crackle of gravel, we pulled into the driveway, briefly illuminating the cottage before Steven cut the engine and helped me out of the truck. He led us to the edge of the cornfield out back. Here the landscape was still, monochrome in moonlight. Framed by dark cornstalks, Steven's face looked serious, purposeful. As he kissed me I thought, "This is happening right now. I am happy right now."

StumbleUpon.com

This is part of a short story (in ultra draft format) that I am picking up again. Because I craved the contrast is an earlier excerpt. I keep on editing it and reposting when I see how awkward/unbalanced/sloppy/overwritten it reads. It's been a while since I've written fiction. This is my warm-up.

Image by
eggman.

I originally called this post "Fever." For a great version of the song (though with an irritating video), listen to
Shirley Horn singing it. It might wipe "Friends in Low Places" out of your mind.
Comments

I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin

sc0083bbc8wtm
It was the last summer of innocence or maybe of discovery, though life was already shifting beneath us. M and I were 19 years old, best friends in the intense way of late adolescence before adulthood shatters things apart. We lived together in a two-bedroom apartment on Queen Street, spent our evenings after work cooking and drinking, sometimes wandering the brick sidewalks of our small college town, sipping gin and tonics disguised in huge plastic cups. Time stretched out before us and we filled it with anger and alcohol, provided shaky support for one another.

The kitchen on Queen Street was out of proportion, with a large linoleumed space that could hold a table for six but contained only an old refrigerator and a telephone jack. The stove, sink, cabinets and counter space were jammed into an adjacent galley. Everything we owned -- pots, pans, dishes, and silverware -- was a parental hand-me-down. In the mornings we would linger over percolated coffee diluted to a muddy brown with half and half, the perfect solution to a mild hangover. Some days I would come home for lunch to make BLTs on poppy seed buns, the bacon still hot from the pan, tomato juice and mayonnaise dripping down my fingers.

This was the place where we learned to cook, tried recipes from
Gourmet Magazine and the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In our year there, we made pizzas from scratch, cleaned and fried squid, and grilled chicken marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, and rosemary. Peter showed us how to make pesto and a cook at the Ironstone brought us a bushel of crawfish that we steamed in a cauldron of boiling water.

I have a file of recipes from that period, most of them copied by hand from
D's mother's cookbooks, some of which I still make, like Lebanese Cucumber Soup, and Rice with Garlic and Walnuts. I even have the pizza recipes from Gourmet, which seemed so exotic at the time (Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza with Peppers, Onion, and Garlic Confit, Broccoli and Ricotta Pizza). Going through them reminds me that I never clip recipes anymore, just search around on the internet or Epicurious to see what looks good. Recipes on paper are another thing I miss from the pre-internet days, another reason to toss our modem out the window. I want a paper trail blotched with oil and tomato sauce. I want tangible memories. I want to have my mind and time returned to me (brief interruption while I look at Facebook: see what I mean?).

Still, the memories remain. When my family returned from vacation last Friday, there was a half batch of gazpacho, vinegary and bright, waiting for us, courtesy of our housesitter. Gazpacho was one of D’s favorite foods and I thought of that long-ago summer, which was also the first time M and I made the soup. The recipe called for peeled, deseeded tomatoes and we were mystified. How did one peel tomatoes? Like, with a vegetable peeler? Or by hand somehow? And, umm, the seeds? What was the problem with seeds? Finally, M called her mother. She gave us instructions: put a big pot of water on to boil, remove the tomato stems and cut Xs in the blossom ends before immersing them in the boiling water for under a minute. Then remove the tomatoes with a strainer and plunge them into an ice bath.The peels would slip off in our hands.


sc005b8900 sc005baa70
Gazpacho recipe, copied in the summer of 1988.

It worked. M and I pureed the still-seedy tomatoes with bread crumbs, garlic, vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice, adding onion and cucumber at the end. The soup chilled while we chopped the garnishes. It was late July on the Eastern Shore. The air was resistant, fluid, like water. Heat flattened the landscape, made the houses across the shimmering street one-dimensional. While I poured the soup, M filled two cups with ice and gin and topped them with tonic and thin wedges of lime. We sat in the living room with our drinks, the bowls of gazpacho balanced on our laps. The soup was bracing, the acidity of the tomato and vinegar complemented by the bite of onion and coolness of cucumber.

sc00856640wtm

Sometimes all that remains is sense memory -- the taste, the scent, the aching loss, the joy of conquest -- or a suspicion that something else must have happened. So maybe M and I went our for a walk that night after the sun went down, barefoot on sidewalks that radiated a memory of sun. Or maybe we refilled our cups again and again and cried about our crazy mothers, our absent fathers. Or we danced to Prince or sung along to Paradise by the Dashboard Light. D may have spent the night, the two of us still and quiet on checkerboard sheets, feeling the pull of the window fan in my attic bedroom, while downstairs M let the smoke from her cigarette drift out of an open window.

That night is lost. But I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin, our kitchen counter splattered with tomato juice, the closeness of friendship at a time when the world was new.

StumbleUpon.com

Images:

Top: Me, a blurry goofball in the yard on Queen Street.
Middle: The original gazpacho recipe.
Bottom: The checkerboard sheets, the
I Love You This Much statue, the orange crate. The artfully-placed bottle of Corona.

Comments

And in the room locked up inside me

80swtm
Oh, the eighties. Crazy eye shadow in unnatural colors that we laid on in thick stripes or with polka dots. Big hair. Hair short on one side, long on the other. Fauxhawks or the real thing (the seventies with its punks and groomed hippies wasn't long gone). The Esprit shirt with little yellow paisley flourishes on a white background that the guys teased me looked like pajamas. MIA shoes, white and pointy. The Limited baggy pants with snaps at the ankles. Men’s shirts on my small adolescent frame. Safety pins linked together as earrings. Florescent pink socks with black flats, G. and me sauntering down South Street (Zipperhead, resale shops, records) us barely fifteen, cigarettes hanging out of our mouths. Buying Marlboros, then cloves, and then, when the smell of smoke made me sick, just British music magazines, from the Smoke Shop across from the Acme.

I remember what it was like to care about fashion and boys and what the other girls thought, all the other girls with their money and their bright sweaters in primary colors and their designer clothes. When you’re a teenager you think everyone else is better off than you, except for S. whose brother would beat her up or F. whose father didn't know he existed or N., who lied about her address, too, and had an alcoholic dad. My friends were the exceptions, but the rest of them, the money flowed like water from a tap and their parents, they might have been strict, but it was in good ways that showed they cared instead of being random like my mother. The other kids had stable parents who drove newer cars. They lived in the suburbs, not the middle of the city where the houses slammed against each other, where you knew everyone's secrets, could smell the neighbor's dinner burning.

It was a time when I joined the consumer world with its fashion and makeup and music to buy (Def Leppard morphed to Wham! and Duran Duran bled into the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, Echo and the Bunnymen) and then retreated from it. In the Little House I was stuck with the dull depression of being fifteen and separated from the world, first alone, then alone and pregnant, and then the survivor of both, still alone, and with life experiences that made me feel so, so old.

But there was beer to drink and a guy who bought it for me. He eventually came around more often, was there for real, for love. D. still lived at home, was the youngest of four in a tight family. They got together for big extended family dinners, would greet me with a hug, kiss my cheek when it was time to say goodbye. The womenfolk prepared delicious food and it always seemed like there were at least twenty people at the table, with toasts ("Proost!") and heated conversation and endless bottles of Grolsch.

I loved that family, their sheer number, their passion and personality, the safety net of so many people. In the photographs, however, I look small. Contained. A little scared, like I knew a secret that could destroy me.

StumbleUpon.com

Image: Me, late December 1984, in my grandfather's yard. This was before I moved to the Little House, but I still spent most weekends and school vacations visiting. I remember this day very well, the abnormally warm temperatures, the feeling of anticipation that D. might show up that night, that he actually did show. Ah, redemption, brief and sweet.

The original prompt was a photo. You can look at it
here.

The post title is a line from a Yaz song that I listened to a lot in the Little House:
In My Room.
Comments

Remember part of me is you

The photograph, pixelated for privacy:

dlittlehouse_pixel

Where it takes me:

*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.

*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road,
the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.

*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.

*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until
after the drama was over.

But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.

I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.

When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."



Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.

Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."

Comments

Because I craved the contrast

creeky
My last boyfriend, Steven, had bay water skin, salty and weathered. He smelled of corn stalks and Maker’s Mark. His family owned the small gas station/convenience store off 213 where underaged kids bought beer and porn magazines and filled up on puckered cheese dogs gone too long in the warmer. That’s where we met, me parking the scooter on a Sunday morning, Steven pulling up in a Ford pickup. I was the only person he knew who drove a scooter and refused to eat red meat. The Eastern Shore was all four-wheel drive and gun racks, tire flaps with silhouettes of busty women: “beer, barbecues, and bosoms,” we used to joke. Steven lived in a small cottage on Gilly’s Neck, a spit of land named after a distant relative who had landed there in the early 1700s. His grandfather built a duck blind adjacent to the creek and on icy late autumn mornings Steven left the comfort of our bed, the pull of my naked body, to put on camouflage and hunker in the blind with a shotgun and a thermos of spiked coffee. I never got used to this, to the mix of blood and booze, the freezer filled with the dark flesh of Canada geese. We celebrated the difference, drank and fought and fucked with malice.

I moved west in part to escape the relationship, to wash the taste of salt and blood out of my mouth. And there was Shelton, clean-smelling, like soap, like a freshly-washed window, sitting across the aisle at our graduate school orientation. He was thin and pale with a cap of dishwater blonde hair. When he contributed to class discussions, he pushed his rimless glasses back and wiggled in his chair before over-intellectualizing a dot point into a master’s thesis. Silence filled him with anxiety. He adorned it with linguistic frills, explaining simple concepts with an academic loquaciousness. It was cute, for a time.

StumbleUpon.com

I've been working on a short story and doing very little other creative work (outside of the Round Robin). This is an excerpt of my story, still in infant form. And since I'm in the middle of it, I have absolutely no perspective on its quality, but I wanted to put something out here, a crumb, a thought, a naughty word, a study in contrasts.
Comments

The bitter scent of coming winter

Back when I was dating my opposite, the racist homophobic conservative hunter J., I was a regular reader of Gourmet magazine. I would prepare special meals for J., smoked salmon ravioli, pissalidière crisscrossed with anchovies and dotted with bitter black olives, pears braced with crystalized ginger and honey and baked to a custardy finish. J. and I had chemistry, an easily bruised love, so we each tolerated the other's differences, limped along even though he lived in another town and had very real reasons to keep me at arm's length.

I remember prep
aring a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.

sageleaves


Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.

Here is the original recipe, from
Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.

Roasted Autumn Vegetables

1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired

In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.

Gourmet
October 1990

Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.

Comments

Shameless

healingshame
Image from Hope4Survivors


You want instant writer's block?

Try to write about your own shame.

That's not how today started. I wanted to write a story about a boyfriend I had in college, the tale of my second long term relationship. Our innocent beginnings. He was a teller in my bank, we shared smiles and pleasantries. Then one evening, when I was leaving the local watering hole with one of my male floozies, J approached me and said “I know you’re leaving with this guy, but can I call you sometime?” I gave him my number.

There was the little detail of my real boyfriend and our slowly dying couplehood. I had to put that out of its misery. It wasn’t a clean death. And when J went on a white water rafting trip with his family a month into our serious dating, I might have had a bar hookup or two. In between his return and our demise, we shared a period of sweet intense love. I loved him. I really did.

I was kind of crazy then. Angry. Pathologically needy. J was sarcastic and cruel, bitingly funny with a mean streak brought on by his quietly twisted childhood. After six months of total absorption, our relationship stalled and then limped along for another two years, with sporadic weekend visits (the margarita-inspired sex in a sprawling azalea near the Capitol grounds; the drunken knock on my door after a Redskins Super Bowl victory; my leap into the pool with the band, fully clothed, after I secretly followed J and
Frieda back to his bedroom). I had a few mini-boyfriends on the sly, including one fellow philosophy major who totally trampled my heart and a graduate student who was a Jew posing as an Italian-American. Nervous about how he would be perceived in a Catholic-tinged philosophy program, the graduate student exploited his olive-toned skin and love of opera to go undercover, lived an odd temporary lie.

Still, J and I continued in our half-love without discussing the side relationships. The week I headed for graduate school, he left me a message, sang “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane,” to my answering machine, funny and bittersweet as ever. In November of that year, 1992, I found out that he’d gotten a new, serious girlfriend. After a tearful, confessional conversation, I mailed him a copy of the credit card receipt for my abortion. I’d been holding on to it for five months, waiting for the right moment to tell him.

Shame.

Ashamed of who I was and what I did. Ashamed of the abortion – the abortion. You think you can wash away shame or pain by showing it to the world, or to a limited subset of the sympathetic. Sorry, my good religious friends, my lovers of life. I let one baby happen by accident and took care of the next by violence.

By the end of my first semester in library school, I was in crisis, totally falling apart. Enter my first real attempt at therapy and my future first husband, the slow process of life rebuilding. If you are reading this, thank you future first husband, future ex-husband, for being so totally solid. I don't think I've given you enough credit for that. There is absolution in unconditional love.

I am starting to sift through the decade after the stillbirth, shining light on a dark time, preparing myself to come clean. I
have wondered if the blog, my self-made public confessional, is the best way to expurgate shame. Wouldn't it be simpler to say nothing at all? Maybe finally get around to locating another trusted therapist, go the traditional recovery route? Or, if I must expose the ugliness, couldn't I just make it quick, compile a list, invite brief flagellation or accolades for my honesty and then move quickly on to self-forgiveness?

No, no, I have to transform the shame into a narrative, examine it inside and out. I need to dust if off, shine it up, put it in the shop window. Later, I'll pass it along to my fictional characters. They are waiting backstage, eager to take on the burden, ready to be set into motion. But before all that, before I can pass the torch in good conscience, I'll occasionally be picking apart my mistakes here, aiming for tricky self-forgiveness.

I hope you can stay with me for the ride, can keep an open mind and an empathetic heart. Oh, the places we’ll go!

Comments

© 2008-2010 writing to survive Email me