News!
Okay, so I've been coerced into applying to WVU's MFA program in creative writing for the fall 2011 semester (focusing on creative nonfiction). I'm ambivalent about this for reasons that will have to wait for another entry. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that I'm taking the GRE in the morning (must go home soon, must get some sleep!), and that everything else is going to follow in very very quick succession.
So. I've been working on the writing sample that has to go with my application. Here it is. It's comprised of several short pieces that I've written over the last few years. Thoughts, please?? Thanks. :/ :sigh:
“Alternate Routes”
We are lost, we are forlorn. We are driving past Walmart at three o’clock in the morning. There is one car in the lot. Down the hill, five restaurants and a bookstore are closed, locked up tight, lit well for security. They are lonely bubbles of vivacious pretense in the surrounding dark. Unreal, plastic, their dormant cheeriness is somehow macabre.
It is late summer, the time of harsh endless afternoons and lazy crows, of spotted knapweed, goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace, wanderlust. I want to go back to New Jersey, I say, maybe Trenton, or farther east. I remember it from when I was a kid, dry hot sidewalks and traffic jams near the shore. Or maybe Montana. I liked it there, except for the snow. I’ve never been to Arizona. Through, yes, but not to.Why not go there next? I’ve never been to California, either. Why not anywhere?
Some day, you say. Next August, December, July. Soon.
We are between worlds, shadows and reflections in a water-smooth window of a dry cleaner’s shop. I am round and hunched, a cartoon villain in an oversized black tee-shirt. You are slim, sharp, deep-eyed and unsure. We overlap, cross one another, fade as brick replaces glass.
A gas station flashes by and sears our retinas. Truckers and construction workers, getting coffee and an early start, are translucent and ghostly in the halogen lights under red canvas awnings. We turn away, looking for lonelier roads. Gliding, floating, not going anywhere in particular. We only want to keep on the move, unsuffocated by sitting still.
Once there was a you and an I, miles ago, in the daylight. We are merged now, in the dark, the lost. Two souls, one pronoun.
The movement of the road soothes us. The curves and hills are a county-sized cradle rocking us into calm. We can’t move forward right now. We don't want to think about where we could be if we traveled in a straight line, about why we aren't there yet, whether we'll ever be. Instead we move constantly sideways, in circles, back.
You are the music-maker, the dreamer of dreams. I am the compiler of lists. Twenty-three things you must do in order to graduate. Forty reasons I can't apply to Berkeley, eighty-two legitimate excuses for them to reject my application if I sent it in. Eleven places the cat threw up last week. One hundred twenty dollar-shaped reasons we can't take her to the vet until after payday. Ten ways to get by until then, eight bills to pay first, three that will have to wait.
We are passing a Denny's now, five cars in the lot, before the first of the breakfast rush. Should we get a burger, some eggs? Nah, let's cruise for a while longer. We've got burgers and eggs at home, no sense paying somebody else to cook them. Yeah, okay. Another loop? I'm bored with town. What about up the ridge, where we went that one time? Okay.
The ridge is steep, and the little car creaks like a rubber band getting ready to snap. You drop it into second gear, then first. We crawl onward and up the curved rising earth, a round blue metal insect on a giant's tree-covered shoulder. The world should wake to swat us, to scratch and mutter and dream again, but it doesn't.
We reach the summit, where the rise pauses for a space of some ten feet before plummeting down again. There is a rough width of clay and shale here, room enough to turn around if you're careful. It ends in the beginning of somebody's back road, gated and chained and overgrown with wild mint and chickory. You back in so we're angled toward the road, set the brake, cut the engine. Without our headlights the woods are moon-pale and utterly still.
We are silenced by our solitude. The clutter and neon that surround us more waking hours than not are absent here. You chatter less, then little, then not at all. I am at a loss for lists. It makes no sense to catalog the trees, the dark quiet wind, the smell of hot packed clay cooling in the night. Our store-front reflections have not followed us here.
Emerging from the car, we are more cautious than two grown people a few miles from town have any need to be. We aren't worried about bears or wildcats. Snakes, we think for a squeamish moment, then dismiss them with all the lore of our childhoods. They're as scared of you as you are of them; step heavily, make a lot of noise and they'll get out of your way.
Our caution is for the boundless dark, the voice-eating silence. Step heavily as we may, only hushed tree noises echo back. Our shapes are as dim as those of the gate, the clay, the hill's great curving mass. Are we certain that we exist? We exchange nervous glances, try to laugh.
We sit on the hood of the car and squint across the road until our eyes begin to adjust. Isn't that the airport over that way, can you see the lights? No, we turned north when we got on the ridge road. That must be the power plant. Maybe the mall. Was that a bear, behind us, rustling? Too small. A snake? Too big. Probably a possum.
The probably a possum turns out to be exactly that. It emerges from the low growth on the woods' edge, creeps past the car in a sway-gaited shuffle, and heads for the road. We strain our eyes for an oncoming dump truck, fully expecting the universe to accommodate us and turn into a bad joke. Why'd the chicken cross the road, you mutter. To prove to the possum that it could be done. The possum regards us from the farthest verge, intact and unhumorous, blank yellow eyes in a narrow gray face. It waddles down the hill, rustles a bit more, and is gone.
We stare into the woods, kicking our heels against the bumper and stirring up gravel with our toes. The air between the trees lightens into hazy tan; layers of decaying leaves take on soft shades of brown and gold. We've forgotten that night isn't eternal. Dawn is about to overtake us again.
We should be getting home. Home is cramped and stuffy and smells like cat vomit. We should try to get some sleep. We did that once already tonight. The sheets glued themselves to our sweat, tangling our legs every time we turned. Street lights blazed through the open window. Skirling, whining clouds of mosquitoes assaulted our exposed flesh. We twitched, we moaned, we got up and got in the car. We don't really want to go back.
Ten minutes behind the possum, a dump truck finally rumbles past. It thunders in the silence and brings the first real light behind it. In the gray sullen dawn you are skinny and tattered; I am sagging and sad. Our reflections swim to the surface of the windshield and look back at us with dark-bagged eyes. We get back in the car.
Denny's? Sure, get some coffee before we go to class. It's too late to sleep now anyway.
Down the ridge road, the wind through the open windows is cooled by the trees, by the last dark whisper of night air. Back in town, the pavement begins to bake and radiate. Pools of asphalt-scent wash around our tires. Sidewalks sweat and hum with anticipated footsteps, busy daylight people who will tread back and forth and back until night falls again.
We turn the wrong way without asking, one more loop before our coffee. The gas station looks ordinary now, bland and colorless but solidly real. The restaurants are getting ready to open. From the hill above, the employees are doll-scale figures in bright, tiny hats.
If we go to Arizona next, can we make sure we get air conditioning?
Sure. Maybe next May, or the August after. Soon.
We are lost, we are forlorn. We are driving past Walmart at six o'clock in the morning.
“Asylum”
I want to go home.
Just for a little while.
It’s snowing again, big wet globs on the sidewalk that stick to the cuffs of my pants. I’ve been trying to do the work of four people all week. I’m tired and sore, bone-weary and irritable. The cat shredded paper towels all over the kitchen counter. Again. I sliced my finger halfway to the bone on a can of anchovies. The dim gray afternoons of winter pound behind my eyes, weigh my limbs, cloud my mind.
I’ve reached my limit. I’ve had enough.
I want to get in the car, sing along with the radio and pick up a Styrofoam cup of stale truck-stop coffee. I want to feel the instinctive calm that grows with each mile, each landmark.
When I’m five miles out, the turns come by memory. I signal before I realize I’ve seen the sign. Sycamore trees follow the road along the river, fields slope into foothills, the sun slides behind the house and into the night. The porch light shines in a tapered wedge of gold across the long gravel driveway, splinters through the pine trees.
I want to go home.
I want to meet my mother at the door, hear her call me “honey” and stretch on tiptoe to hug me. Her hair is gray and light brown this time of year, silver and gold in the summer. She grew up spanning the years between housewife and radical feminist; these days she’s a bit of both. Coffee cake and letter-writing campaigns, laundry and marches on Washington. She has a pencil stuck behind her ear, bifocals dangling from a decorative beaded chain. She’s rolled up her sleeves to work on something. I don’t smell baking, so it must be the Equal Rights Amendment again. Her arms are crepey and freckled and strong.
My dad bellows an echoing hello from the garage and then comes in, wiping his hands on a grease rag and asking if I’ve put my storm windows up yet. Every fall I tell him the landlord does it; every winter he’s just checking, just making sure.
My father looks like a mixture of Mark Twain and Santa Claus; bushy white hair and neatly trimmed mustache, crinkled web of smile lines around clear blue eyes. He keeps an ancient electric typewriter in the garage, on the far edge of his workbench. In the corner behind the bench a neat tall stack of printed pages, all smudged slightly and marked in light pencil for later revision, rests on a makeshift table that was once the engine block from a 1955 Chevy flatbed truck. Homemade shelves by the back window hold rows of his published work-tractor magazines, local newspapers, a small anthology stained with antifreeze.
He writes about his childhood in New Jersey, before the farm fields vanished under asphalt, about trucks he’s owned and jobs he’s worked, about us, his family. Stories and essays pour out of him, fragrant of grease and wood smoke in their initial drafts. They are tales of classic tractors and the orchards of Virginia, of the infinite back roads of Appalachia and the people who live there. My father keeps to himself, lives half hidden in his work. The rest of us smile when the garage sounds change, from the whine of the air wrench to the hesitant but determined rattle of keys beneath the wide fingers of a man who never learned to type.
Blinking in the brighter light of the kitchen after the comfortable gloom of the garage, he leans his elbows on the table while he listens. They leave black half moons of gear lube mixed with typewriter ink on the aged, polished wood. Mom laughs and shakes her head. I hand him a paper towel, then another, then the whole roll. We talk about people we’ve known since I was fifteen, twelve, two, telling the same stories with different endings, extra details, speculations. We pretend not to notice the myths we’re spinning, the time honored fictions of memory.
My two sisters, young and younger, but always so much older and taller and closer to adult than I remember, come chattering in from the back yard. Scarves are hung to drip on the wood stove, gloves lost in sleeves, tea water put on to boil. They share the breathless news that it’s started to snow again, hard, probably be six inches by morning, maybe a foot.
Am I staying the night? I am.
The same girls who stole my Cabbage Patch doll when I was eight (and painted her porous fabric fingers bright purple) cheer at this announcement, promise to wake me up early so we can go sledding. The middle sister--the one who runs marathons and paints murals and laughs at my jokes more often than not--plays with my hair, braids it, tells me I need a trim.
We sit around the kitchen table and talk until Mom starts to yawn, protest that no she didn’t, then yawn again. My youngest sister, the one who was blond when she was a baby and is now six foot two, gets me an extra pillow and fresh sheets. There’s a sewing machine in one corner and a layer of dust on the dresser, but otherwise my room is a time capsule from the summer after high school. I feel huge and awkward here at first. Soon, I find myself reaching for a jewelry box that went to Goodwill six years ago, a teddy bear lost when I was ten.
Mom brings me a toothbrush and asks if I’m all right. She knows I’m not, but I will be, that I’m strong and capable and I know what I’m doing. The bad times are just a detour, she says. Home is a rest stop, a quick visit to the pit crew, a call to triple A. Good lord, Mom, get some new metaphors, I say. She laughs and hugs me, promises she’ll have a whole new batch next time. Maybe mountain climbing or construction, how would that be? That’d be fine, Mom. That’d be just fine.
She leaves the door open a crack, forgetting in the force of habit that I haven’t needed a night light since I was five and my middle sister shared my room, that I was never afraid of the dark. I go to sleep with the lemon-pale bar of hallway light resting like a hand across my shoulders.
I want to go home.
I want that to be home. Just for a little while.
The wood stove and the porch light, the comfort and the laughter, fade into guilty fantasy. I conjured them up to keep me from setting the comforter on fire, screaming at the cat, quitting my job, and throwing the anchovies out the window. It’s still snowing. The storm windows are in the basement, I think, covered with three seasons’ cobwebs and mouse droppings.
Two hours east, I know, is something that goes by the name “home,” assuming home is defined as the place where you spent the years between zero and eighteen. I could go. I could be in the car now, slushing along the interstate, looking for the exit that would take me to another hour of winding back roads.
The road has sycamores, yes, and a river that overflows its banks in alternate Januaries. It also has several summers’ worth of litter poking through a week’s gravel-gray snow, dozens of sun-bleached beer cans and soda bottles full of tobacco spit or worse. The foothills are the mountains, so dense and close you’d never know there’s anything beyond. Sunset is gone before it starts, shining salmon and lavender and apricot on some other valley, some other driveway. A last few pink tatters slink off into the western sky, and darkness falls like an iron door closing.
I chain smoke for the last ten miles, but make sure to flick the last butt out the window before I get too near their road. Part of me wants to pull a giant, sliding U-turn right there in the middle of Route 50, forget the whole trip, retreat to the comfort and familiarity of melancholy solitude. I am flayed onward by grim determination, obligation, stubborn hope.
Maybe this time will be different. Maybe not.
The trailer’s porch light is broken again. The front steps are falling in with dry rot and age. Potholes rattle my windows in the driveway; mud sucks my shoes in the yard. Mom peers out the small front window and motions me around to the back.
I pass the garage, set back twenty feet or so from the corner of the porch. Pa leans out the door to see who’s there. He waves one grease-blackened hand, and returns to the muffled rumble of whatever’s on public radio tonight, to the fascination of a half-torn-down Massey Ferguson tractor, to his solitude and the company of a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He may emerge before midnight, or he may fall asleep in the warped red leather office chair beside the wood stove. He’s never been comfortable with more than a few people around, and my arrival has exceeded his maximum capacity.
Mom leans around the back door and screams at the dogs. One leaps to slather my face with friendly strings of saliva. The other hops backward in agitation and barks at this stranger who has invaded his porch. He always warms up to me after an hour or so, then forgets me entirely each time I leave. Pa likes to say that dogs don’t have brains; their hair roots meet in the middle.
I wipe muddy dog-prints from my jeans and edge into the hallway. With the washer and the dryer and everyone’s coats, there isn’t room for more than one person. Mom waits in the kitchen, calling the dogs. They bounce back and forth, torn between a familiar voice and a novel pair of ankles that must be sniffed and licked and claimed as their own.
The washing machine is falling through the floor again. There must’ve been another leak, maybe a frozen pipe. A large piece of heavy-grade plywood leaning against the wall indicates Mom’s good intentions, but I know she won’t get a chance to replace the floor until the weather warms. By then something else will have broken or collapsed, and she’ll make a weekend of it.
The dogs have given me the most enthusiastic greeting I’m going to get. We’re not big on mushy stuff, my family; I can count on one hand the number of times either parent has hugged me. My sisters and I laugh about this, and all share a slightly squeamish feeling when anyone touches us, an automatic pulling away. We choose our companions from those who can express affection with sarcasm, with a joke and a light, quick punch on the shoulder. Distance makes us comfortable. It relieves us of the straining, grinding effort it takes to live outside our experience, wrapped in everyone else’s normal but removed from our own.
I nod hello to Mom from across the kitchen table. She nods back.
The cardboard trailer walls, with their built-in tan floral wallpaper, are thickly hung with squares of white all-purpose paper. Each square exhibits my mother’s precise handwriting in large letters, vivid shades of magic marker. Half the bible is pasted up here somewhere.
It’s not the pleasant half, the verses that make it onto samplers and cheap posters with unreal clouds bleeding sunlight. These are the obscure bits, the pieces that they have blown into mammoth significance, from which they have created a way of life. I want to look away but there is no away; only another wall, another scripture. Second Timothy and Nehemiah, the prophecies of Ezra, of Ezekiel, Haggai. Leviticus and Revelation, shall nots and begats, yards of Exodus overlapping an inch or two of Psalms.
I remember the verses hanging over my head every day of my childhood, something to live up to, to strive for. I never attained their wall-mounted and ambiguous perfection, never even got close. But still I strove, I strove.
I gave up striving long ago, left the colorful bibled walls behind. Still they surround me here, looming in the certain knowledge that I am never good enough. I am a lost sheep, an apostate, a pity, a joke. Nothing real, only that, something to retrieve, like a vagrant raccoon in the animal control noose, a trout in a long-handled net. Every time I come here I feel the invisible noose, the net, the urge to dodge and duck and run.
I feel foolish and I fight it, but still it’s there.
My sisters aren’t home yet. The youngest is waiting tables at a small Italian restaurant where old men in high-waisted pants order decaf with their free bread sticks, and take their time. The middle sister is busy with her fortieth hour this week of teaching someone, anyone--every bored housewife and vulnerable, doubting teenager in a three-county radius--about God’s plan for them, for the world. She works so hard, so well, so modestly. She doesn’t leave time for sin. She doesn’t leave room for pride.
Mom smiles when she tells me this, then frowns when she realizes who she’s telling.
She switches to gossip, to stories about the lives and loves and offspring of people I grew up thinking were my friends, people who drifted away when we were no longer bound by shared obedience, no longer fellow strivers under the looming, watchful bibled walls. Everyone’s doing so well, she says, listing promotions and happy families and God’s grace to a poster-perfect group of people who all help one another, who shine like the sun.
She inserts a joke here, a squabble there, to make them human, make them real. Still they are cardboard and lacquer. They wear stiff smiles, advertisements in their eyes.
I know better. I understand, I empathize. Didn’t I spend fourteen years editing myself in just the same way, blanking out anything that might let in doubt? She won’t tell the other side, and we both know that. No reference to the minister’s daughter who’s in prison for selling heroin, the sexual abuse lawsuits against congregations, or the end of the world. True prophecy, the indisputable light of God through his organization on earth, told her it would come in 1914, 1975, last November. She waits. She believes.
She won’t mention the divorces, the unemployment, the spouses beaten and the children pulled from school, the mental illness and the ones who simply don’t come back. To her, those don’t exist. To her, they’re lost, worthless without retrieval, not a part of the census of perfection. If they suffer, it’s because they’re not holy enough, not right with God.
This is not a friendly mother-daughter chat. This is a hard sell, always, every time.
For all that, it’s better than nothing.
We make tea, share the leftovers of her homemade garlic and spinach chicken soup, guaranteed to knock any cold or flu smack on its ass. She asks how I’m doing.
That means she wants the cut-down version, the few extracted pieces that are safe to share. I can’t resist the sick, vicious joy of slipping in a few slivers of the outside world.
She clamps her lips into a thin, straight minus sign of disapproval and dismissal when I mention a Buddhist coworker, the nice lesbian couple who lives down the hall, this great research paper I read, about cult survivors, domestic violence, and traumatic stress. She looks over my head when I mention politics, a passing kudos to a great lady who got reelected to the state legislature this fall. Mom is above all that, chosen of God, not part of this world.
I might as well be discussing pornography, homicide, fecal matter in the potato salad.
She changes the subject. We talk about mountaintop removal, strip malls, the juggernaut spread of Wal-Mart. The environment is our default topic, one thing we can agree on. Before she found God, before she dropped out of college, before she was my mother, this woman read Foxfire books and built her own cabin. She grew organic vegetables and quoted Thoreau. In pictures from that time, her wild hair is held back by a blue bandanna. She has a shovel and a smile and bearded hippies hanging out on her sturdy hand-hewn porch.
Aside from a shared love of nature, though, our current perspectives diverge. I’d like to see slower, more carefully planned development, more greenspaces, fewer pesticides. She’s counting on God to make a new heaven and a new earth that will never pass away. Any day now. You wait and see.
The development of a faith-versus-works screaming match is interrupted by the arrival of my youngest sister, the waitress. Little Sister is nearly six feet tall, nineteen years old, vibrantly alive and scented of mozzarella sticks. She is also less warped than we other two; she gives me an awkward half-hug with one arm, and smiles at us both.
Middle Sister catches the door with her shoulder before Little Sister’s closed it all the way. She picks her way through the narrow kitchen and sheds several bags full of magazines, pamphlets, brightly printed explanations of why God desires your submission to his earthly organization. She glows like a saint, like a martyr, a theocratic sacrifice of living. Mom smiles again, relaxes her brow, gets up to heat more soup.
The Sisters' arrival makes a total of two Jeeps-a Wagoneer and a Grand Cherokee-dwarfing my tiny Geo in the driveway; no chance of a quick escape. I feel my chest tighten.
Middle Sister is twenty-three. She reads a little, shares my taste for trashy medical thrillers and fantasy novels. We chat about which books we’ve read lately, which we’ve enjoyed and which ones we’ve passed over.
My ‘passed over’ list is nonexistent; I’ll read the side of a cereal box if nothing else is handy. Her list is extensive and oddly contradictory. This book had too much magic, that one too much sex, violence, subversive themes. Can I borrow that one? Of course not; she threw it away and washed her hands afterward. The worst, she says, had a focus on independent thought, self-reliance, that she felt was blasphemous, that drew the characters away from God’s will for them.
Brain-eating zombies and rampaging mutants, though, somehow make the cut. They must be especially pious zombies, I think. Mutants on a mission from God.
I’ll laugh about that later, shake my head at the irony. Maybe. Maybe I’ll worry, mourn for the waste. I’ll wonder what she’d have been like in a different life, how she’d have grown and become herself. More likely, I’ll jot down an outline for a research project on self-censoring, the effects of faith on a person’s tolerance for cognitive dissonance.
If you can’t cry, I think, you laugh. If you can’t do either, you research.
It’s getting late now, and my sisters are edging away, getting ready to go to bed. Middle Sister asks if I’ll be back in June for her half-marathon. Little Sister wants to know when I’ll stop by the restaurant. Maybe next time, on my way in, but I’m busy in June. July, for the bluegrass festival? Maybe, if I can get time off work. Maybe.
Goodnights and goodbyes are called from opposite ends of the trailer as the girls wash their faces, tie up their hair, close their bedroom doors.
My parents worry that they might chase away the younger two, fail with them like they did with me. The shame of one daughter lost to the outside world is something they can live down, blame on Satan’s temptation of the weak. If they lose another, the congregation might murmur, question their parenting, doubt their dedication. They can’t have that.
I left home at twelve minutes past ten, the morning of my eighteenth birthday. My absence could have equalized the pressure for space, relieved some of the tension of five people in a two-bedroom trailer. Instead, it gave the younger two a bargaining chip, broke a little of my parents’ power over them. Each sister got her own room.
That was eleven years and six months ago. Mom and Pa sleep on the living room floor, on the unrolled foam mattress of the sofa-bed. Mom wonders why she’s so stiff all the time. Pa figures he must’ve strained his back lifting that transmission last week.
There is no room for me to stay, even if I wanted to, even if I were welcome. I thank Mom for the soup and she walks me to the door. The dogs lick me again, no longer excited enough to jump and bark. The garage is dark; deep, guttural snores mingle with the late-night radio news. I wave goodbye anyway, and write “Hi, Pa!” in the dust on his truck.
Backing and edging around my sisters’ Jeeps, I see the back porch light wink out before I’ve cleared the driveway. Goodnight, Mom.
Ten miles out my stomach begins to unknot, my chest loosens. Twenty miles and I’m humming, twenty-five and I smile. I accelerate into the windy night and the looping hills, riding high on the freedom, hope, relief that come with sixty miles an hour, seventy.
No point checking the speedometer now, it’s movement that matters. I don’t need to be driving toward the fantasy; away from the reality is enough. Away.
I pull onto the interstate. Gray guardrails converge into the miles ahead, the distance behind. The in-between spaces, the long stretches of nowhere, bring an unsought but strangely familiar sense of calm, of comfort.
It feels like going home.
“Hampshire County, 2009”
Nothing is linear, nothing absolute. Returning here has tangled my realities, brought past and present and worlds I haven't lived yet into a strange, almost affectionate cheek-to-cheek-to-cheek drunken shuffle. Each day on the way to work I drive past the former homes of friends I never thought to wonder if I would forget. “Tim Springmann's road,” my father says, giving directions, and from twelve years past my mind manufactures a ghostly bus stop, a red-headed boy and his brother, early mornings with fog clinging close to the ground and hazing every breath. “In the valley between the two mountains, yeah?” I ask. “First road on the right, dirt, kind of sneaks up on you?” I don't have to see his nod. Suddenly, again, I'm sure.
I didn't make it to the county fair this year, but I know how it would have been if I had. I would have walked alone while others walked in pairs, in groups, in families. This sounds tragic, but isn't. I've always walked that way. I've come here every summer since I was a little girl. When I was fourteen I saved my money for a tie-dyed shirt with sequins on it, to sparkle in the dim light. I wore tight jeans. I curled my hair. That was fun, in its way, but this is so much better, this stretching to meet the edges of my skin and wear them comfortably, complete, in earth tones and wrinkles.
The night swirls warm and fragrant around me, past me, beyond my reach. That's okay; it's supposed to. The scent of country ham sandwiches and hand-cut fries meets the heavy reek of manure from the stock shows, and the two blend better than you'd expect. Before I ever smoked a cigarette, I craved them from the smell on the carnies' skin, on their breath, around the entry gates to every ride.
If you'd been there, if we had gone together, it would have been different. Better, maybe, but I would have lost something of my invisibility, of my observer status, something that I probably shouldn't enjoy but nonetheless do. That can always wait for another year-fair runs into fair, after all, world without end, hey there buddy win a bear, cotton candy, bad bands with worse amplification, baffled six year olds with crinolines and mascara, glitter and tap shoes.
I've seen it before and I'll see it again. This year, let me see you instead. You walk with gliding assurance, and your slender fingers twine between mine while you're doing something else, unaware or unconcerned. You smile easily, lean up to kiss me, your hair waterfalling down your back as your chin rises. I'm not used to having the most beautiful woman in any situation be the one I'm with, but something in me swells with amazement and simple joy.
Simple joy isn't so simple. We'll never rival the freaks in the sideshows of yesteryear, but folks around here can be easily amused, cruel in the ways of those who know about belonging and not. They have my youth in their teeth, these people, torn away like a stale hide years ago. The ones who have grown up now to run the car dealerships and dentists' offices are the ones who muttered “bitch” and crossed to the other side of the hall in junior high, who aimed the dodgeball too high and too hard.
I've given the locals enough in the course of thirty years, almost more than I had to give. It's their turn to give a little-how 'bout some space on the midway, there, for me and my girl to walk from the Round-Up to the Tempest? Arms linked and tangled and your head nearly even with my shoulder, we'll saunter past the shooting games and the throwing games and the kiddie games with the hard plastic ducks that bob past, numbers on their bellies.
The carousel is in there somewhere, and a miniature roller coaster that gives you whiplash if you're more than four feet tall. Maybe we'll stop and watch as the cars creak around the track again. Maybe we won't, maybe we're bound beyond the lights and past the parked horse vans, past the band bus and the last sheriff's deputy, leaning against his cruiser, arms crossed, face blankly turned toward the distant sparkle, the far-off tinkle of tinned music in the dark.
I want to take you to the top of the Ferris wheel.
I want to rock the car.
“Shuffle”
The song comes on the car stereo and, not four beats in, Kat appears in my passenger seat. Wide grin, square jaw, flawlessly straight pale blonde hair that I know from experience requires three different products and an appliance. About like she looked when last I saw her, two and a half, three years ago, maybe. She's turned sideways to face me, one elbow resting on the seat, the other on the dashboard.
“Put on your seatbelt,” I say to the hallucination.
“You have lipstick on your cheek.” She reaches with a thumb to wipe it off.
I get there first with the cuff of my jacket. “I don't wear lipstick any more. It's ketchup. I just had fries. Actually, you're sitting on them.”
Kat seems unconcerned. We drive a mile or so in silence.
The song is “Seasons of Love,” from the musical Rent. Yes, yes, I've laughed in response to friends' jokes more than once, show tunes, wrong gay stereotype. My playlist has its share of Indigo Girls songs too, sure, maybe a little Melissa Etheridge, and I've been in love with Mary Chapin Carpenter since I was nineteen, but I've always enjoyed the exuberance of show tunes, the sheer balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm, the unabashed emotion. Does it get any more upbeat than “June is busting out all over” (or, for that matter, “I'm singing in the rain”)? Does anything express longing more than “I've been living to see you/Dying to see you but it shouldn't be like this/Could we start again please?” or “Don't cry for me, Argentina/The truth is, I never left you”?
I think not.
Kat was my first real love. Doesn't get much more unabashedly emotional than that, either. Every time I hear that song, she comes rushing back into my mind. Not usually, I grant, in this concrete a fashion. Is it a full moon? Have I driven off the edge of the world? Kat does not deign to offer her opinion. She only regards me, solemnly but with that dear, dear smile playing around the corner of her lips, folds her feet beneath her, and reaches out as if to brush a strand of hair out of my eyes. I've worn a low maintenance crew-cut for a year and a half. We seem to be inhabiting different lines of the space-time continuum. Strange. Or would it be stranger if we weren't? A toss-up, I decide. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The only solution, since the hallucination refuses to put on its seatbelt and I'd really like to finish those fries, is the fast forward button. It was a mistake to put this song back on my playlist after all these years. I thought I was ready, thought I'd forgotten what it's like to sing a duet in the shower, complete with sound effects and gestures. Apparently not.
“Seasons of Love” fades, and so does Kat. I signal a left turn and wait for some douchebag in a white Explorer to meander through the intersection. His tires throw slush onto my windshield, and I'm fumbling with the button/switch combination for the wiper fluid spray when I realize what's coming through the car's speakers this time. Oh, fuck me running . . . .
Jubilee. No, not the beautiful, nearly-accapella Mary Chapin Carpenter song. Or, well, yes, that, but not only that. Also a stripper of the same name. She doesn't sprawl across the passenger seat like Kat did. I don't know if she's wearing her seat belt, but the angle at which her legs appear, stretched full length on either side of my head, toes touching the visor, ankles taunting my temples, suggests not.
“Hey, girl.” She twitches one smooth, stockinged knee. Barefoot, thank the gods. I'd rather not lose an eardrum to an imaginary stilletto heel.
“You ruined this song for me, you know that, right?” I'm still pissed. I don't like to mix my eras, and the innocence of first hearing, overplaying, and adoring the album as a teenager jars oddly against the experiene of dating a series of mentally quirky but intensely hot women in my mid-twenties. It's as if somebody dressed my childhood teddy bear up in bondage gear. Both great things separately, but together? Not cool.
Her calves do a little shimmy along the side of my jaw, and the warm flesh scent of her brings me perilously close to the curb.
“You could have dated Cherry Pie, and ruined that old Warrant song instead.”
“Cherry was a drag queen, hon. I don't think I was her type.”
“True.”
I nuzzle her instep and brake for a red light. Some scary part of me wonders what it would be like to kick the car into park, leap into the back seat, and test the boundaries of illusion. The rest of me prevails, waits patiently for the green, whispers “goodbye” into Jubilee's shins, and presses fast forward again.
Why I don't simply press “off” or switch to the endless banality of commericial radio, I don't know. Given the choice between insanity, silence, or top 40, what's a girl to do?
“Don't stand so/Don't stand so close to me . . . .” Amanda, a big-eyed brunette, flickers in the rearview mirror before I banish her with the press of a button. That was an ugly era, a low depressive stretch in my early thirties. We would have torn one another apart, shred by shred, using only our teeth, if it had been possible to do that and still survive to hate another day.
“Wouldn't it be good if we could hop a flight to anywhere/So long to this life . . . .” Helen. So sweet, when I knew her, all of a month before we moved to different cities; me for work, she for school. She gazes out the passenger side window, leans her cheek there, won't look at me. She is never angry. She never tells me to go fuck myself. We never would have worked.
“I could drink a case of you/And still be on my feet . . . .” A case and a half, honey, sleepy-eyed red-haired Corey murmurs, maybe two cases, maybe more; drown me in you, ignore the danger signs you've seen before. This time is new, this time is different, this time is me. Oh, yes, I fell for that one. Once. Didn't we all?
The majority of songs pass unaccompanied, and I begin to relax. A little Old Crow Medicine Show, Atmosphere, Joan Baez, Passion Pit. I sing along, five miles from home, stretching the tenseness of long travel, of careful highway vigilance, out of my neck. I press fast forward one more time.
My street. Headlights illuminate familiar mailboxes, the same old shrubs.
National Public Radio sells a compilation called “Driveway Moments,” containing all the shows that were so engrossing that people listening on their homeward commutes would pause before getting out of the car and going into the house, wanting to hear how they ended. If Crazy Exgirlfriend Radio has an equivalent, this is most decidedly it.
I circle the block. I circle several blocks.
“I've got you under my skin/So deep in the heart of me/You're really a part of me . . . .” The song is by Peggy Lee, from the album Black Coffee. Peggy Lee was a crooner, a torch-song-singer, frequently the voice of Benny Goodman tunes, belting out the vocals while old Benny himself was busy wailing, bopping on the clarinet. The song is from 1953.
The girl is from 2004. Hannah. Always, always, damn it, with music or without, Hannah.
I doubt she ever would have heard the song if I hadn't included it on a mix CD I burned and brought with me on an early visit. “Some of the songs in this mix remind me of you, of us,” I told her. “And others I just thought you might like. I'm not going to tell you which are which. You have to guess. Or ask.” I smiled. She smacked me on the shoulder with the CD case, put the disk on to play, and pulled me into her orbit.
She hums it at eight o'clock the next morning, making me a lumberjack's breakfast which she, despite a slender figure that wouldn't make a third of a lumberjack, enthusiastically shares. She whistles five or six bars in the park the day after that, skips for a few steps, grins, and takes my hand. I plod on, earthbound and content, next to her. I hear the first lines drifting softly from the bedroom at midnight, and distract her before she reaches the chorus.
It was good. It was catchy and beautiful. It was precisely the right length-not November Rain long nor Minimum Wage short, but enough to enjoy, enough to miss when it was gone. Enough to want to play it over.
I pull into my driveway, finally, into the short ugly gravel parking space.
On the last notes, puzzled half-tangible hazel eyes meet mine, silent from the seat next to me, from the space where she's moved my cup holders aside to slide close. Again, we almost touch. Almost. The song ends. The car is dark. Empty. I shut off the engine.
As I lift my bag from the floor, I gently detach the mp3 player from the line-in socket. Its digital display is still glowing blue, paused, waiting for instruction, waiting for me. I close the car door and turn toward the worn cement steps, the small porch covered with outdoor carpeting of hideous fake-grass green, dusted with the first real snow of the season, dark and cold and quiet. Across the street is a vacant lot, lost now in the suburban darkness and swirling snow. In the center of the lot, I know, is a weed-clogged shallow stream. I spin hard from the waist and throw the mp3 player in a high spinning arch. I hear the splash. Goodbye, you chorus of ghosts, of spiteful wistful muses. Goodbye, again and again, goodbye.
My footsteps on the porch leave tracks in the snow as if no-one had ever set foot there before, as if this were utterly new territory, unexplored. And maybe, in all the multiplicity of universes lost and found, it is.
I'm sure the formatting didn't come through, but hopefully you were able to figure it out. Thanks!! Off home now; wish me luck.
So. I've been working on the writing sample that has to go with my application. Here it is. It's comprised of several short pieces that I've written over the last few years. Thoughts, please?? Thanks. :/ :sigh:
“Alternate Routes”
We are lost, we are forlorn. We are driving past Walmart at three o’clock in the morning. There is one car in the lot. Down the hill, five restaurants and a bookstore are closed, locked up tight, lit well for security. They are lonely bubbles of vivacious pretense in the surrounding dark. Unreal, plastic, their dormant cheeriness is somehow macabre.
It is late summer, the time of harsh endless afternoons and lazy crows, of spotted knapweed, goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace, wanderlust. I want to go back to New Jersey, I say, maybe Trenton, or farther east. I remember it from when I was a kid, dry hot sidewalks and traffic jams near the shore. Or maybe Montana. I liked it there, except for the snow. I’ve never been to Arizona. Through, yes, but not to.Why not go there next? I’ve never been to California, either. Why not anywhere?
Some day, you say. Next August, December, July. Soon.
We are between worlds, shadows and reflections in a water-smooth window of a dry cleaner’s shop. I am round and hunched, a cartoon villain in an oversized black tee-shirt. You are slim, sharp, deep-eyed and unsure. We overlap, cross one another, fade as brick replaces glass.
A gas station flashes by and sears our retinas. Truckers and construction workers, getting coffee and an early start, are translucent and ghostly in the halogen lights under red canvas awnings. We turn away, looking for lonelier roads. Gliding, floating, not going anywhere in particular. We only want to keep on the move, unsuffocated by sitting still.
Once there was a you and an I, miles ago, in the daylight. We are merged now, in the dark, the lost. Two souls, one pronoun.
The movement of the road soothes us. The curves and hills are a county-sized cradle rocking us into calm. We can’t move forward right now. We don't want to think about where we could be if we traveled in a straight line, about why we aren't there yet, whether we'll ever be. Instead we move constantly sideways, in circles, back.
You are the music-maker, the dreamer of dreams. I am the compiler of lists. Twenty-three things you must do in order to graduate. Forty reasons I can't apply to Berkeley, eighty-two legitimate excuses for them to reject my application if I sent it in. Eleven places the cat threw up last week. One hundred twenty dollar-shaped reasons we can't take her to the vet until after payday. Ten ways to get by until then, eight bills to pay first, three that will have to wait.
We are passing a Denny's now, five cars in the lot, before the first of the breakfast rush. Should we get a burger, some eggs? Nah, let's cruise for a while longer. We've got burgers and eggs at home, no sense paying somebody else to cook them. Yeah, okay. Another loop? I'm bored with town. What about up the ridge, where we went that one time? Okay.
The ridge is steep, and the little car creaks like a rubber band getting ready to snap. You drop it into second gear, then first. We crawl onward and up the curved rising earth, a round blue metal insect on a giant's tree-covered shoulder. The world should wake to swat us, to scratch and mutter and dream again, but it doesn't.
We reach the summit, where the rise pauses for a space of some ten feet before plummeting down again. There is a rough width of clay and shale here, room enough to turn around if you're careful. It ends in the beginning of somebody's back road, gated and chained and overgrown with wild mint and chickory. You back in so we're angled toward the road, set the brake, cut the engine. Without our headlights the woods are moon-pale and utterly still.
We are silenced by our solitude. The clutter and neon that surround us more waking hours than not are absent here. You chatter less, then little, then not at all. I am at a loss for lists. It makes no sense to catalog the trees, the dark quiet wind, the smell of hot packed clay cooling in the night. Our store-front reflections have not followed us here.
Emerging from the car, we are more cautious than two grown people a few miles from town have any need to be. We aren't worried about bears or wildcats. Snakes, we think for a squeamish moment, then dismiss them with all the lore of our childhoods. They're as scared of you as you are of them; step heavily, make a lot of noise and they'll get out of your way.
Our caution is for the boundless dark, the voice-eating silence. Step heavily as we may, only hushed tree noises echo back. Our shapes are as dim as those of the gate, the clay, the hill's great curving mass. Are we certain that we exist? We exchange nervous glances, try to laugh.
We sit on the hood of the car and squint across the road until our eyes begin to adjust. Isn't that the airport over that way, can you see the lights? No, we turned north when we got on the ridge road. That must be the power plant. Maybe the mall. Was that a bear, behind us, rustling? Too small. A snake? Too big. Probably a possum.
The probably a possum turns out to be exactly that. It emerges from the low growth on the woods' edge, creeps past the car in a sway-gaited shuffle, and heads for the road. We strain our eyes for an oncoming dump truck, fully expecting the universe to accommodate us and turn into a bad joke. Why'd the chicken cross the road, you mutter. To prove to the possum that it could be done. The possum regards us from the farthest verge, intact and unhumorous, blank yellow eyes in a narrow gray face. It waddles down the hill, rustles a bit more, and is gone.
We stare into the woods, kicking our heels against the bumper and stirring up gravel with our toes. The air between the trees lightens into hazy tan; layers of decaying leaves take on soft shades of brown and gold. We've forgotten that night isn't eternal. Dawn is about to overtake us again.
We should be getting home. Home is cramped and stuffy and smells like cat vomit. We should try to get some sleep. We did that once already tonight. The sheets glued themselves to our sweat, tangling our legs every time we turned. Street lights blazed through the open window. Skirling, whining clouds of mosquitoes assaulted our exposed flesh. We twitched, we moaned, we got up and got in the car. We don't really want to go back.
Ten minutes behind the possum, a dump truck finally rumbles past. It thunders in the silence and brings the first real light behind it. In the gray sullen dawn you are skinny and tattered; I am sagging and sad. Our reflections swim to the surface of the windshield and look back at us with dark-bagged eyes. We get back in the car.
Denny's? Sure, get some coffee before we go to class. It's too late to sleep now anyway.
Down the ridge road, the wind through the open windows is cooled by the trees, by the last dark whisper of night air. Back in town, the pavement begins to bake and radiate. Pools of asphalt-scent wash around our tires. Sidewalks sweat and hum with anticipated footsteps, busy daylight people who will tread back and forth and back until night falls again.
We turn the wrong way without asking, one more loop before our coffee. The gas station looks ordinary now, bland and colorless but solidly real. The restaurants are getting ready to open. From the hill above, the employees are doll-scale figures in bright, tiny hats.
If we go to Arizona next, can we make sure we get air conditioning?
Sure. Maybe next May, or the August after. Soon.
We are lost, we are forlorn. We are driving past Walmart at six o'clock in the morning.
“Asylum”
I want to go home.
Just for a little while.
It’s snowing again, big wet globs on the sidewalk that stick to the cuffs of my pants. I’ve been trying to do the work of four people all week. I’m tired and sore, bone-weary and irritable. The cat shredded paper towels all over the kitchen counter. Again. I sliced my finger halfway to the bone on a can of anchovies. The dim gray afternoons of winter pound behind my eyes, weigh my limbs, cloud my mind.
I’ve reached my limit. I’ve had enough.
I want to get in the car, sing along with the radio and pick up a Styrofoam cup of stale truck-stop coffee. I want to feel the instinctive calm that grows with each mile, each landmark.
When I’m five miles out, the turns come by memory. I signal before I realize I’ve seen the sign. Sycamore trees follow the road along the river, fields slope into foothills, the sun slides behind the house and into the night. The porch light shines in a tapered wedge of gold across the long gravel driveway, splinters through the pine trees.
I want to go home.
I want to meet my mother at the door, hear her call me “honey” and stretch on tiptoe to hug me. Her hair is gray and light brown this time of year, silver and gold in the summer. She grew up spanning the years between housewife and radical feminist; these days she’s a bit of both. Coffee cake and letter-writing campaigns, laundry and marches on Washington. She has a pencil stuck behind her ear, bifocals dangling from a decorative beaded chain. She’s rolled up her sleeves to work on something. I don’t smell baking, so it must be the Equal Rights Amendment again. Her arms are crepey and freckled and strong.
My dad bellows an echoing hello from the garage and then comes in, wiping his hands on a grease rag and asking if I’ve put my storm windows up yet. Every fall I tell him the landlord does it; every winter he’s just checking, just making sure.
My father looks like a mixture of Mark Twain and Santa Claus; bushy white hair and neatly trimmed mustache, crinkled web of smile lines around clear blue eyes. He keeps an ancient electric typewriter in the garage, on the far edge of his workbench. In the corner behind the bench a neat tall stack of printed pages, all smudged slightly and marked in light pencil for later revision, rests on a makeshift table that was once the engine block from a 1955 Chevy flatbed truck. Homemade shelves by the back window hold rows of his published work-tractor magazines, local newspapers, a small anthology stained with antifreeze.
He writes about his childhood in New Jersey, before the farm fields vanished under asphalt, about trucks he’s owned and jobs he’s worked, about us, his family. Stories and essays pour out of him, fragrant of grease and wood smoke in their initial drafts. They are tales of classic tractors and the orchards of Virginia, of the infinite back roads of Appalachia and the people who live there. My father keeps to himself, lives half hidden in his work. The rest of us smile when the garage sounds change, from the whine of the air wrench to the hesitant but determined rattle of keys beneath the wide fingers of a man who never learned to type.
Blinking in the brighter light of the kitchen after the comfortable gloom of the garage, he leans his elbows on the table while he listens. They leave black half moons of gear lube mixed with typewriter ink on the aged, polished wood. Mom laughs and shakes her head. I hand him a paper towel, then another, then the whole roll. We talk about people we’ve known since I was fifteen, twelve, two, telling the same stories with different endings, extra details, speculations. We pretend not to notice the myths we’re spinning, the time honored fictions of memory.
My two sisters, young and younger, but always so much older and taller and closer to adult than I remember, come chattering in from the back yard. Scarves are hung to drip on the wood stove, gloves lost in sleeves, tea water put on to boil. They share the breathless news that it’s started to snow again, hard, probably be six inches by morning, maybe a foot.
Am I staying the night? I am.
The same girls who stole my Cabbage Patch doll when I was eight (and painted her porous fabric fingers bright purple) cheer at this announcement, promise to wake me up early so we can go sledding. The middle sister--the one who runs marathons and paints murals and laughs at my jokes more often than not--plays with my hair, braids it, tells me I need a trim.
We sit around the kitchen table and talk until Mom starts to yawn, protest that no she didn’t, then yawn again. My youngest sister, the one who was blond when she was a baby and is now six foot two, gets me an extra pillow and fresh sheets. There’s a sewing machine in one corner and a layer of dust on the dresser, but otherwise my room is a time capsule from the summer after high school. I feel huge and awkward here at first. Soon, I find myself reaching for a jewelry box that went to Goodwill six years ago, a teddy bear lost when I was ten.
Mom brings me a toothbrush and asks if I’m all right. She knows I’m not, but I will be, that I’m strong and capable and I know what I’m doing. The bad times are just a detour, she says. Home is a rest stop, a quick visit to the pit crew, a call to triple A. Good lord, Mom, get some new metaphors, I say. She laughs and hugs me, promises she’ll have a whole new batch next time. Maybe mountain climbing or construction, how would that be? That’d be fine, Mom. That’d be just fine.
She leaves the door open a crack, forgetting in the force of habit that I haven’t needed a night light since I was five and my middle sister shared my room, that I was never afraid of the dark. I go to sleep with the lemon-pale bar of hallway light resting like a hand across my shoulders.
I want to go home.
I want that to be home. Just for a little while.
The wood stove and the porch light, the comfort and the laughter, fade into guilty fantasy. I conjured them up to keep me from setting the comforter on fire, screaming at the cat, quitting my job, and throwing the anchovies out the window. It’s still snowing. The storm windows are in the basement, I think, covered with three seasons’ cobwebs and mouse droppings.
Two hours east, I know, is something that goes by the name “home,” assuming home is defined as the place where you spent the years between zero and eighteen. I could go. I could be in the car now, slushing along the interstate, looking for the exit that would take me to another hour of winding back roads.
The road has sycamores, yes, and a river that overflows its banks in alternate Januaries. It also has several summers’ worth of litter poking through a week’s gravel-gray snow, dozens of sun-bleached beer cans and soda bottles full of tobacco spit or worse. The foothills are the mountains, so dense and close you’d never know there’s anything beyond. Sunset is gone before it starts, shining salmon and lavender and apricot on some other valley, some other driveway. A last few pink tatters slink off into the western sky, and darkness falls like an iron door closing.
I chain smoke for the last ten miles, but make sure to flick the last butt out the window before I get too near their road. Part of me wants to pull a giant, sliding U-turn right there in the middle of Route 50, forget the whole trip, retreat to the comfort and familiarity of melancholy solitude. I am flayed onward by grim determination, obligation, stubborn hope.
Maybe this time will be different. Maybe not.
The trailer’s porch light is broken again. The front steps are falling in with dry rot and age. Potholes rattle my windows in the driveway; mud sucks my shoes in the yard. Mom peers out the small front window and motions me around to the back.
I pass the garage, set back twenty feet or so from the corner of the porch. Pa leans out the door to see who’s there. He waves one grease-blackened hand, and returns to the muffled rumble of whatever’s on public radio tonight, to the fascination of a half-torn-down Massey Ferguson tractor, to his solitude and the company of a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He may emerge before midnight, or he may fall asleep in the warped red leather office chair beside the wood stove. He’s never been comfortable with more than a few people around, and my arrival has exceeded his maximum capacity.
Mom leans around the back door and screams at the dogs. One leaps to slather my face with friendly strings of saliva. The other hops backward in agitation and barks at this stranger who has invaded his porch. He always warms up to me after an hour or so, then forgets me entirely each time I leave. Pa likes to say that dogs don’t have brains; their hair roots meet in the middle.
I wipe muddy dog-prints from my jeans and edge into the hallway. With the washer and the dryer and everyone’s coats, there isn’t room for more than one person. Mom waits in the kitchen, calling the dogs. They bounce back and forth, torn between a familiar voice and a novel pair of ankles that must be sniffed and licked and claimed as their own.
The washing machine is falling through the floor again. There must’ve been another leak, maybe a frozen pipe. A large piece of heavy-grade plywood leaning against the wall indicates Mom’s good intentions, but I know she won’t get a chance to replace the floor until the weather warms. By then something else will have broken or collapsed, and she’ll make a weekend of it.
The dogs have given me the most enthusiastic greeting I’m going to get. We’re not big on mushy stuff, my family; I can count on one hand the number of times either parent has hugged me. My sisters and I laugh about this, and all share a slightly squeamish feeling when anyone touches us, an automatic pulling away. We choose our companions from those who can express affection with sarcasm, with a joke and a light, quick punch on the shoulder. Distance makes us comfortable. It relieves us of the straining, grinding effort it takes to live outside our experience, wrapped in everyone else’s normal but removed from our own.
I nod hello to Mom from across the kitchen table. She nods back.
The cardboard trailer walls, with their built-in tan floral wallpaper, are thickly hung with squares of white all-purpose paper. Each square exhibits my mother’s precise handwriting in large letters, vivid shades of magic marker. Half the bible is pasted up here somewhere.
It’s not the pleasant half, the verses that make it onto samplers and cheap posters with unreal clouds bleeding sunlight. These are the obscure bits, the pieces that they have blown into mammoth significance, from which they have created a way of life. I want to look away but there is no away; only another wall, another scripture. Second Timothy and Nehemiah, the prophecies of Ezra, of Ezekiel, Haggai. Leviticus and Revelation, shall nots and begats, yards of Exodus overlapping an inch or two of Psalms.
I remember the verses hanging over my head every day of my childhood, something to live up to, to strive for. I never attained their wall-mounted and ambiguous perfection, never even got close. But still I strove, I strove.
I gave up striving long ago, left the colorful bibled walls behind. Still they surround me here, looming in the certain knowledge that I am never good enough. I am a lost sheep, an apostate, a pity, a joke. Nothing real, only that, something to retrieve, like a vagrant raccoon in the animal control noose, a trout in a long-handled net. Every time I come here I feel the invisible noose, the net, the urge to dodge and duck and run.
I feel foolish and I fight it, but still it’s there.
My sisters aren’t home yet. The youngest is waiting tables at a small Italian restaurant where old men in high-waisted pants order decaf with their free bread sticks, and take their time. The middle sister is busy with her fortieth hour this week of teaching someone, anyone--every bored housewife and vulnerable, doubting teenager in a three-county radius--about God’s plan for them, for the world. She works so hard, so well, so modestly. She doesn’t leave time for sin. She doesn’t leave room for pride.
Mom smiles when she tells me this, then frowns when she realizes who she’s telling.
She switches to gossip, to stories about the lives and loves and offspring of people I grew up thinking were my friends, people who drifted away when we were no longer bound by shared obedience, no longer fellow strivers under the looming, watchful bibled walls. Everyone’s doing so well, she says, listing promotions and happy families and God’s grace to a poster-perfect group of people who all help one another, who shine like the sun.
She inserts a joke here, a squabble there, to make them human, make them real. Still they are cardboard and lacquer. They wear stiff smiles, advertisements in their eyes.
I know better. I understand, I empathize. Didn’t I spend fourteen years editing myself in just the same way, blanking out anything that might let in doubt? She won’t tell the other side, and we both know that. No reference to the minister’s daughter who’s in prison for selling heroin, the sexual abuse lawsuits against congregations, or the end of the world. True prophecy, the indisputable light of God through his organization on earth, told her it would come in 1914, 1975, last November. She waits. She believes.
She won’t mention the divorces, the unemployment, the spouses beaten and the children pulled from school, the mental illness and the ones who simply don’t come back. To her, those don’t exist. To her, they’re lost, worthless without retrieval, not a part of the census of perfection. If they suffer, it’s because they’re not holy enough, not right with God.
This is not a friendly mother-daughter chat. This is a hard sell, always, every time.
For all that, it’s better than nothing.
We make tea, share the leftovers of her homemade garlic and spinach chicken soup, guaranteed to knock any cold or flu smack on its ass. She asks how I’m doing.
That means she wants the cut-down version, the few extracted pieces that are safe to share. I can’t resist the sick, vicious joy of slipping in a few slivers of the outside world.
She clamps her lips into a thin, straight minus sign of disapproval and dismissal when I mention a Buddhist coworker, the nice lesbian couple who lives down the hall, this great research paper I read, about cult survivors, domestic violence, and traumatic stress. She looks over my head when I mention politics, a passing kudos to a great lady who got reelected to the state legislature this fall. Mom is above all that, chosen of God, not part of this world.
I might as well be discussing pornography, homicide, fecal matter in the potato salad.
She changes the subject. We talk about mountaintop removal, strip malls, the juggernaut spread of Wal-Mart. The environment is our default topic, one thing we can agree on. Before she found God, before she dropped out of college, before she was my mother, this woman read Foxfire books and built her own cabin. She grew organic vegetables and quoted Thoreau. In pictures from that time, her wild hair is held back by a blue bandanna. She has a shovel and a smile and bearded hippies hanging out on her sturdy hand-hewn porch.
Aside from a shared love of nature, though, our current perspectives diverge. I’d like to see slower, more carefully planned development, more greenspaces, fewer pesticides. She’s counting on God to make a new heaven and a new earth that will never pass away. Any day now. You wait and see.
The development of a faith-versus-works screaming match is interrupted by the arrival of my youngest sister, the waitress. Little Sister is nearly six feet tall, nineteen years old, vibrantly alive and scented of mozzarella sticks. She is also less warped than we other two; she gives me an awkward half-hug with one arm, and smiles at us both.
Middle Sister catches the door with her shoulder before Little Sister’s closed it all the way. She picks her way through the narrow kitchen and sheds several bags full of magazines, pamphlets, brightly printed explanations of why God desires your submission to his earthly organization. She glows like a saint, like a martyr, a theocratic sacrifice of living. Mom smiles again, relaxes her brow, gets up to heat more soup.
The Sisters' arrival makes a total of two Jeeps-a Wagoneer and a Grand Cherokee-dwarfing my tiny Geo in the driveway; no chance of a quick escape. I feel my chest tighten.
Middle Sister is twenty-three. She reads a little, shares my taste for trashy medical thrillers and fantasy novels. We chat about which books we’ve read lately, which we’ve enjoyed and which ones we’ve passed over.
My ‘passed over’ list is nonexistent; I’ll read the side of a cereal box if nothing else is handy. Her list is extensive and oddly contradictory. This book had too much magic, that one too much sex, violence, subversive themes. Can I borrow that one? Of course not; she threw it away and washed her hands afterward. The worst, she says, had a focus on independent thought, self-reliance, that she felt was blasphemous, that drew the characters away from God’s will for them.
Brain-eating zombies and rampaging mutants, though, somehow make the cut. They must be especially pious zombies, I think. Mutants on a mission from God.
I’ll laugh about that later, shake my head at the irony. Maybe. Maybe I’ll worry, mourn for the waste. I’ll wonder what she’d have been like in a different life, how she’d have grown and become herself. More likely, I’ll jot down an outline for a research project on self-censoring, the effects of faith on a person’s tolerance for cognitive dissonance.
If you can’t cry, I think, you laugh. If you can’t do either, you research.
It’s getting late now, and my sisters are edging away, getting ready to go to bed. Middle Sister asks if I’ll be back in June for her half-marathon. Little Sister wants to know when I’ll stop by the restaurant. Maybe next time, on my way in, but I’m busy in June. July, for the bluegrass festival? Maybe, if I can get time off work. Maybe.
Goodnights and goodbyes are called from opposite ends of the trailer as the girls wash their faces, tie up their hair, close their bedroom doors.
My parents worry that they might chase away the younger two, fail with them like they did with me. The shame of one daughter lost to the outside world is something they can live down, blame on Satan’s temptation of the weak. If they lose another, the congregation might murmur, question their parenting, doubt their dedication. They can’t have that.
I left home at twelve minutes past ten, the morning of my eighteenth birthday. My absence could have equalized the pressure for space, relieved some of the tension of five people in a two-bedroom trailer. Instead, it gave the younger two a bargaining chip, broke a little of my parents’ power over them. Each sister got her own room.
That was eleven years and six months ago. Mom and Pa sleep on the living room floor, on the unrolled foam mattress of the sofa-bed. Mom wonders why she’s so stiff all the time. Pa figures he must’ve strained his back lifting that transmission last week.
There is no room for me to stay, even if I wanted to, even if I were welcome. I thank Mom for the soup and she walks me to the door. The dogs lick me again, no longer excited enough to jump and bark. The garage is dark; deep, guttural snores mingle with the late-night radio news. I wave goodbye anyway, and write “Hi, Pa!” in the dust on his truck.
Backing and edging around my sisters’ Jeeps, I see the back porch light wink out before I’ve cleared the driveway. Goodnight, Mom.
Ten miles out my stomach begins to unknot, my chest loosens. Twenty miles and I’m humming, twenty-five and I smile. I accelerate into the windy night and the looping hills, riding high on the freedom, hope, relief that come with sixty miles an hour, seventy.
No point checking the speedometer now, it’s movement that matters. I don’t need to be driving toward the fantasy; away from the reality is enough. Away.
I pull onto the interstate. Gray guardrails converge into the miles ahead, the distance behind. The in-between spaces, the long stretches of nowhere, bring an unsought but strangely familiar sense of calm, of comfort.
It feels like going home.
“Hampshire County, 2009”
Nothing is linear, nothing absolute. Returning here has tangled my realities, brought past and present and worlds I haven't lived yet into a strange, almost affectionate cheek-to-cheek-to-cheek drunken shuffle. Each day on the way to work I drive past the former homes of friends I never thought to wonder if I would forget. “Tim Springmann's road,” my father says, giving directions, and from twelve years past my mind manufactures a ghostly bus stop, a red-headed boy and his brother, early mornings with fog clinging close to the ground and hazing every breath. “In the valley between the two mountains, yeah?” I ask. “First road on the right, dirt, kind of sneaks up on you?” I don't have to see his nod. Suddenly, again, I'm sure.
I didn't make it to the county fair this year, but I know how it would have been if I had. I would have walked alone while others walked in pairs, in groups, in families. This sounds tragic, but isn't. I've always walked that way. I've come here every summer since I was a little girl. When I was fourteen I saved my money for a tie-dyed shirt with sequins on it, to sparkle in the dim light. I wore tight jeans. I curled my hair. That was fun, in its way, but this is so much better, this stretching to meet the edges of my skin and wear them comfortably, complete, in earth tones and wrinkles.
The night swirls warm and fragrant around me, past me, beyond my reach. That's okay; it's supposed to. The scent of country ham sandwiches and hand-cut fries meets the heavy reek of manure from the stock shows, and the two blend better than you'd expect. Before I ever smoked a cigarette, I craved them from the smell on the carnies' skin, on their breath, around the entry gates to every ride.
If you'd been there, if we had gone together, it would have been different. Better, maybe, but I would have lost something of my invisibility, of my observer status, something that I probably shouldn't enjoy but nonetheless do. That can always wait for another year-fair runs into fair, after all, world without end, hey there buddy win a bear, cotton candy, bad bands with worse amplification, baffled six year olds with crinolines and mascara, glitter and tap shoes.
I've seen it before and I'll see it again. This year, let me see you instead. You walk with gliding assurance, and your slender fingers twine between mine while you're doing something else, unaware or unconcerned. You smile easily, lean up to kiss me, your hair waterfalling down your back as your chin rises. I'm not used to having the most beautiful woman in any situation be the one I'm with, but something in me swells with amazement and simple joy.
Simple joy isn't so simple. We'll never rival the freaks in the sideshows of yesteryear, but folks around here can be easily amused, cruel in the ways of those who know about belonging and not. They have my youth in their teeth, these people, torn away like a stale hide years ago. The ones who have grown up now to run the car dealerships and dentists' offices are the ones who muttered “bitch” and crossed to the other side of the hall in junior high, who aimed the dodgeball too high and too hard.
I've given the locals enough in the course of thirty years, almost more than I had to give. It's their turn to give a little-how 'bout some space on the midway, there, for me and my girl to walk from the Round-Up to the Tempest? Arms linked and tangled and your head nearly even with my shoulder, we'll saunter past the shooting games and the throwing games and the kiddie games with the hard plastic ducks that bob past, numbers on their bellies.
The carousel is in there somewhere, and a miniature roller coaster that gives you whiplash if you're more than four feet tall. Maybe we'll stop and watch as the cars creak around the track again. Maybe we won't, maybe we're bound beyond the lights and past the parked horse vans, past the band bus and the last sheriff's deputy, leaning against his cruiser, arms crossed, face blankly turned toward the distant sparkle, the far-off tinkle of tinned music in the dark.
I want to take you to the top of the Ferris wheel.
I want to rock the car.
“Shuffle”
The song comes on the car stereo and, not four beats in, Kat appears in my passenger seat. Wide grin, square jaw, flawlessly straight pale blonde hair that I know from experience requires three different products and an appliance. About like she looked when last I saw her, two and a half, three years ago, maybe. She's turned sideways to face me, one elbow resting on the seat, the other on the dashboard.
“Put on your seatbelt,” I say to the hallucination.
“You have lipstick on your cheek.” She reaches with a thumb to wipe it off.
I get there first with the cuff of my jacket. “I don't wear lipstick any more. It's ketchup. I just had fries. Actually, you're sitting on them.”
Kat seems unconcerned. We drive a mile or so in silence.
The song is “Seasons of Love,” from the musical Rent. Yes, yes, I've laughed in response to friends' jokes more than once, show tunes, wrong gay stereotype. My playlist has its share of Indigo Girls songs too, sure, maybe a little Melissa Etheridge, and I've been in love with Mary Chapin Carpenter since I was nineteen, but I've always enjoyed the exuberance of show tunes, the sheer balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm, the unabashed emotion. Does it get any more upbeat than “June is busting out all over” (or, for that matter, “I'm singing in the rain”)? Does anything express longing more than “I've been living to see you/Dying to see you but it shouldn't be like this/Could we start again please?” or “Don't cry for me, Argentina/The truth is, I never left you”?
I think not.
Kat was my first real love. Doesn't get much more unabashedly emotional than that, either. Every time I hear that song, she comes rushing back into my mind. Not usually, I grant, in this concrete a fashion. Is it a full moon? Have I driven off the edge of the world? Kat does not deign to offer her opinion. She only regards me, solemnly but with that dear, dear smile playing around the corner of her lips, folds her feet beneath her, and reaches out as if to brush a strand of hair out of my eyes. I've worn a low maintenance crew-cut for a year and a half. We seem to be inhabiting different lines of the space-time continuum. Strange. Or would it be stranger if we weren't? A toss-up, I decide. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The only solution, since the hallucination refuses to put on its seatbelt and I'd really like to finish those fries, is the fast forward button. It was a mistake to put this song back on my playlist after all these years. I thought I was ready, thought I'd forgotten what it's like to sing a duet in the shower, complete with sound effects and gestures. Apparently not.
“Seasons of Love” fades, and so does Kat. I signal a left turn and wait for some douchebag in a white Explorer to meander through the intersection. His tires throw slush onto my windshield, and I'm fumbling with the button/switch combination for the wiper fluid spray when I realize what's coming through the car's speakers this time. Oh, fuck me running . . . .
Jubilee. No, not the beautiful, nearly-accapella Mary Chapin Carpenter song. Or, well, yes, that, but not only that. Also a stripper of the same name. She doesn't sprawl across the passenger seat like Kat did. I don't know if she's wearing her seat belt, but the angle at which her legs appear, stretched full length on either side of my head, toes touching the visor, ankles taunting my temples, suggests not.
“Hey, girl.” She twitches one smooth, stockinged knee. Barefoot, thank the gods. I'd rather not lose an eardrum to an imaginary stilletto heel.
“You ruined this song for me, you know that, right?” I'm still pissed. I don't like to mix my eras, and the innocence of first hearing, overplaying, and adoring the album as a teenager jars oddly against the experiene of dating a series of mentally quirky but intensely hot women in my mid-twenties. It's as if somebody dressed my childhood teddy bear up in bondage gear. Both great things separately, but together? Not cool.
Her calves do a little shimmy along the side of my jaw, and the warm flesh scent of her brings me perilously close to the curb.
“You could have dated Cherry Pie, and ruined that old Warrant song instead.”
“Cherry was a drag queen, hon. I don't think I was her type.”
“True.”
I nuzzle her instep and brake for a red light. Some scary part of me wonders what it would be like to kick the car into park, leap into the back seat, and test the boundaries of illusion. The rest of me prevails, waits patiently for the green, whispers “goodbye” into Jubilee's shins, and presses fast forward again.
Why I don't simply press “off” or switch to the endless banality of commericial radio, I don't know. Given the choice between insanity, silence, or top 40, what's a girl to do?
“Don't stand so/Don't stand so close to me . . . .” Amanda, a big-eyed brunette, flickers in the rearview mirror before I banish her with the press of a button. That was an ugly era, a low depressive stretch in my early thirties. We would have torn one another apart, shred by shred, using only our teeth, if it had been possible to do that and still survive to hate another day.
“Wouldn't it be good if we could hop a flight to anywhere/So long to this life . . . .” Helen. So sweet, when I knew her, all of a month before we moved to different cities; me for work, she for school. She gazes out the passenger side window, leans her cheek there, won't look at me. She is never angry. She never tells me to go fuck myself. We never would have worked.
“I could drink a case of you/And still be on my feet . . . .” A case and a half, honey, sleepy-eyed red-haired Corey murmurs, maybe two cases, maybe more; drown me in you, ignore the danger signs you've seen before. This time is new, this time is different, this time is me. Oh, yes, I fell for that one. Once. Didn't we all?
The majority of songs pass unaccompanied, and I begin to relax. A little Old Crow Medicine Show, Atmosphere, Joan Baez, Passion Pit. I sing along, five miles from home, stretching the tenseness of long travel, of careful highway vigilance, out of my neck. I press fast forward one more time.
My street. Headlights illuminate familiar mailboxes, the same old shrubs.
National Public Radio sells a compilation called “Driveway Moments,” containing all the shows that were so engrossing that people listening on their homeward commutes would pause before getting out of the car and going into the house, wanting to hear how they ended. If Crazy Exgirlfriend Radio has an equivalent, this is most decidedly it.
I circle the block. I circle several blocks.
“I've got you under my skin/So deep in the heart of me/You're really a part of me . . . .” The song is by Peggy Lee, from the album Black Coffee. Peggy Lee was a crooner, a torch-song-singer, frequently the voice of Benny Goodman tunes, belting out the vocals while old Benny himself was busy wailing, bopping on the clarinet. The song is from 1953.
The girl is from 2004. Hannah. Always, always, damn it, with music or without, Hannah.
I doubt she ever would have heard the song if I hadn't included it on a mix CD I burned and brought with me on an early visit. “Some of the songs in this mix remind me of you, of us,” I told her. “And others I just thought you might like. I'm not going to tell you which are which. You have to guess. Or ask.” I smiled. She smacked me on the shoulder with the CD case, put the disk on to play, and pulled me into her orbit.
She hums it at eight o'clock the next morning, making me a lumberjack's breakfast which she, despite a slender figure that wouldn't make a third of a lumberjack, enthusiastically shares. She whistles five or six bars in the park the day after that, skips for a few steps, grins, and takes my hand. I plod on, earthbound and content, next to her. I hear the first lines drifting softly from the bedroom at midnight, and distract her before she reaches the chorus.
It was good. It was catchy and beautiful. It was precisely the right length-not November Rain long nor Minimum Wage short, but enough to enjoy, enough to miss when it was gone. Enough to want to play it over.
I pull into my driveway, finally, into the short ugly gravel parking space.
On the last notes, puzzled half-tangible hazel eyes meet mine, silent from the seat next to me, from the space where she's moved my cup holders aside to slide close. Again, we almost touch. Almost. The song ends. The car is dark. Empty. I shut off the engine.
As I lift my bag from the floor, I gently detach the mp3 player from the line-in socket. Its digital display is still glowing blue, paused, waiting for instruction, waiting for me. I close the car door and turn toward the worn cement steps, the small porch covered with outdoor carpeting of hideous fake-grass green, dusted with the first real snow of the season, dark and cold and quiet. Across the street is a vacant lot, lost now in the suburban darkness and swirling snow. In the center of the lot, I know, is a weed-clogged shallow stream. I spin hard from the waist and throw the mp3 player in a high spinning arch. I hear the splash. Goodbye, you chorus of ghosts, of spiteful wistful muses. Goodbye, again and again, goodbye.
My footsteps on the porch leave tracks in the snow as if no-one had ever set foot there before, as if this were utterly new territory, unexplored. And maybe, in all the multiplicity of universes lost and found, it is.
I'm sure the formatting didn't come through, but hopefully you were able to figure it out. Thanks!! Off home now; wish me luck.