Terrible Mother

Work in Progress

(from the novel. This concerns Lucy, the main character, who went to Iraq as a cook, lost a lover there, then returned stateside to lose a second lover, Gorilla (nickname from bootcamp) to a heroin overdose).

“No, no. You had pasta. I had hummus.”

“Hummus?”

“Chickpeas, olive oil, tahini. Pita bread on the side.”

“I always forget what’s in that,” Eli says, pushing the hair out of his eyes. It’s getting long now and the curls hang around his face like a veil. He’s growing it out, he says, for a charity or something. He’s like that. Sweet. Kind. Generous with his hair.

“Did you wear the green sweater?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “That was our second date. The first was the ivory one you like.”

“With the flowers?” He means embroidered flowers. Ivory thread on ivory cotton, the pattern vined and vaguely East Indian, invisible from far away. It’s his favorite shirt. Mine too.

I nod and smile. Reach across the table of this date—which is something around number 17—and tuck his hair behind his ear. Not that I’m counting.

When the waitress comes Eli smiles his wide, boy’s grin. “She’ll have the salmon,” he says, pointing to me. “And I’ll have the seared ahi.” The waitress glances at me, then Eli. We’re too young to order like this, barely out of our twenties, but Eli likes it and, strangely, so do I. It’s a comfort to let someone else be in charge. The waitress ticks off choices like a metronome, things for me to choose: Potatoes. Soups. Vegetables. I pick, then order an Old-fashioned because the restaurant is paneled in dark, deep-grained wood, there is a fire burning in the corner, and it feels like a place where someone would order an Old-fashioned, swirl the mahogany liquor and slices of orange, then say something important.

This is what I’ll tell Eli later, when we’re laying in bed. That the color of the walls and the warm room reminded me of something—my Grandfather, maybe. Or my Great-Grandfather. Drinking bourbon in the den under the moth-eaten deer head, even though none of it would be true. Eli doesn’t know how easy it is, creating a story out of one tiny piece, linking it to something else, tracing it back so that everything appears true.

The waitress leaves after Eli orders a double Crown, and we are quiet for a moment in her absence, looking at each other. We’re always like this, like we have to, every time, get used to being alone together.

This is Eli’s story: he’s thirty, but barely looks twenty-five; is a chaplain at the VA, but is heavily tattooed; managed to survive a head-on collision, but is now the proud owner of a memory poked full of holes. We met at the VA. On our first date, the ivory one, he explained it this way: “Imagine someone shows you a ten-second movie clip where some minor character says his single line. Then they turn off the projector and you have to figure out what the entire movie is about. That’s what it’s like.”

He’s more or less right. What sticks is either weighty—the day his mother came home from the mastectomy, the day his father taught him to drive—or impossibly mundane—the formula for converting Fahrenheit to Centigrade, the origin of the color “maroon.” Useful stuff is in there, too: Kings Solomon and David. Job. Even Kubler-Ross. But our dates don’t stick very well.

“You’d think they’d make them easier,” Eli says. We’re on his bed in his house, covers on the floor, both of us half-naked. We’re sitting in a cross-legged embrace of sorts, his legs over mine. He’s fumbling with the hooks of my bra.

“All the parents of America are counting on hooks that can’t be unhooked,” I say. “Bra makers have a responsibility to uphold.”

He laughs, arms wrapped around me so tight I could believe it’s an embrace if I ignored the frantic movements on my back.

“It would be easier if I could see them.”

“Yes, but then how sexy is that? Turning me around to undo my bra?”

Eli sighs, and rests his head on my shoulder, though it’s more a sign of concentration than attraction.

“Of all the things I can’t remember, this is probably the worst.”

“Or the most useful thing you could have forgotten.” I say. I turn my head, kiss his ear.

“Wait. Are you implying that you were once good at this?”

One hook comes undone.

“Not implying, Lucy. Saying.”

“Inventing maybe.”

“Always arguing.”

He gets another hook, then runs his hand up my back, pulling against the lace strap.

“There’s one left, genius.”

“There is?”

“There are three.”

“When did they start making bras with three hooks?”

I don’t tell him that any girl over 27 has a bra with at least three hooks, if not four. It’s like he forgets that none of us are 18 anymore, with lithe bodies and tits that haven’t started to sag. He always thinks it’s two hooks. Sometimes I kiss his forehead and wonder what’s in there. Is the memory of that first girl buried (who he insists he doesn’t remember, but laughs when I say that it’s a convenient lapse), but still informing everything from here on out? The backseat of a rust-colored Buick Regal, skin sticking to the vinyl seats, a pale shoulder in the dark, the taste of warm Coors, the smell of cigarettes on fingers. But, anyway, that’s my memory, not his.

“Yesterday,” I answer. I reach back, unhook the lone straggler. I think of Gorilla, running his finger over the border of my tank top, pulling me into the car, gently, gently, running his lips over my neck, the taste of Camels and sweat on his skin. How I never wanted anything but to feel the pull of desire, an overwhelming crush, the ability to be loved by someone for only wanting them. I take Eli’s hand, run it along my shoulder. I let him guide the straps off, let him throw the bra to the floor.

*tm

Work in Progress: A Postscript

I've been thinking about how to finish the last non-fiction piece I posted. Right now, it's mostly just pretty, and you can tell I'm sort of having fun writing it in places. But a lot of it's flinching. It's good flinching, but it's flinching all the same. What am I trying to get at here I ask myself. I do not yet know.

But this is something I know. Friend Two and I, equal parts melancholy and depressed in the past few weeks, have decided to take a roadtrip. Destination: Montana to visit Friend One. Date of Departure: September 22nd. Which also happens to be the day my divorce is finalized. John and I will be in court at 9:30, will likely be out by 10:00, since there is nothing being contested, and in the grand scheme of things, it has been a relatively placid split. But I knew I wouldn't, couldn't, go work that day, and so Friend Two and I will leave in his car and make the 10-hour drive to Montana.

If I can't figure out what I'm getting to about roadtrips, the need to travel, at that point, then you can all take away my laptop and never let me write again.

*tm

Work in Progress

(This is the opening, and is as far as I've gotten, on a new non-fiction piece. It's still untitled)

Last year, I surprised Friend Two when I sent him an email that said something to the effect of “Let’s drive to Crawford, Texas and spend a few days at the protest.” He responded first laughingly, then with confusion, and then incredulity. Over the course of several days I tried, lamely, to explain why I wanted to drive for 36 hours, sit in the baking sun of Texas at a protest that was about to close shop anyway, and then drive 36 hours home.

I could tell that he thought I had been suddenly moved by Cindy Sheehan’s story and her protest, the way much of left-America had. In truth, she had only given me a place to go, made it specific. In my mind, I saw Crawford, though I knew better, as the archetypal Texas small-town, layered in a fine patina of dust, and littered with bars filled by all those men who have made an existence out of waiting—waiting for a season of soft-puddled rain, a cool winter, a football team that makes it to State.

Friend Two didn't understand that what I wanted was a place to go, to travel to. Someplace that was not here, where I had to face the wreck of my marriage, a life I had not truly wanted, but had clung to all the same.

And beyond that, what I wanted was to see the transformation of land and place before my eyes, to see the highways of Oregon, flanked with fir and pine, quilted with grass, melt into the low-hilled arteries running through California, then into the painted Arizona desert. I wanted to watch the way that, when you drive, land seems to unfold before you, as though solely at your command, like fabric unrolling from a spool.

This is what I imagined would happen on our trip to Whidbey Island, and in a way, it did. The kids and I drove five hours to the island. We stopped at little towns in Washington, ate hamburgers at diners, played in unfamiliar parks. The landscape between Oregon and Washington is so similar that it takes a careful eye to notice the differences. In Washington, the hills are softer, thicker with grass, and they rise more gently than in Oregon. Along the freeways, there are signs for the ferries that carry you across the bays and sounds, to the islands that dot the west side of the state. In Washington, the road unfurls against the terrain almost tenderly, like the way Highway 20 kisses the shore of Penn Cove on Whidbey.

I told myself I didn’t want to go on vacation without Jon, but had to because everything was set: reservations made and paid for, the kids excited, bags literally packed. This was only partially true. I also wanted to go, wanted to get in the car and drive, windows down, hair tangled from wind and sweat, forearms burning, because I thought that this would save me. I thought that the difference between home and Whidbey, home and foreign, would buoy me from the break-up. Part of me believes, has always believed, in the act of traveling, of moving from one landscape to another. Not just in escape, but in escape as an act of transformation.

When I was 17, I dreamt of driving to Boston. I imagined how the lushness of California would give way to the plain-gold austerity of the Midwest, then to the greyed cities of the East, then finally to Boston. I imagined walking in crowds downtown, absorbing the city. What a relief to be hemmed in by red brick and brown stone and concrete. What a relief to be swallowed by the city. In the low, dirt hills of California, my father would be dying. But in Boston I would let myself be lulled by the bitter winter, charmed by the unfamiliar lift of tongue, the consonants subtracted from words. I would be comforted by the foreign.

I never drove to Boston—only got as far as San Francisco. Which was, as it turned out, foreign enough.

*tm

Work in Progress

(This is from a story called "A Familiar Place," a piece that I've been working with, on and off, for two years. In the story, Becky is leaving Nathaniel and taking their son Joshua with her. It's a difficult story to manage because it's third person point of view, but each section alternates from Nathaniel to Becky, the main characters, as the point-of-view character. As the story goes on, each section gets shorter, resulting in a final very short scene that is omniscient. It's not really working yet, though, and I'm struggling to figure out why.)

Becky zipped up the suitcases, then buckled them. The bus to Seattle left in two hours, and she still had to pack up Joshua’s clothes and toys. She carried each suitcase, one at a time, to the hallway and the landing above the stairs. Her hair curled in sweaty threads around her face, and she thought about packing up Joshua’s room, how it would be cooler on the main floor out of the rising heat. She looked down the stairs, ran a hand over her forehead. She picked up the larger suitcase, better to get the worst over with, and started to lug it down. It was heavy. Impossibly heavy, and after a few stairs, she set it down. She opened her mouth to call for Nathaniel and then stopped. She couldn’t expect him to carry her bags out to the truck, load them up like a gentleman. She closed her eyes, reached down, and picked up the suitcase again. For a moment, she stood on the stairs, hands trembling with the weight of what she was taking. Then she let the suitcase go.

In the moment when she let go, she realized she felt relieved. Relieved to let things happen. To stand by and watch them. She thought the suitcase would tumble down, maybe hit the sideboard at the bottom, make the cobalt blue vase on top wobble.

But the suitcase just dropped and didn’t slide down. Becky kicked it. When it didn’t go she kicked it again. It still didn’t move. Finally she bent down low and pushed with her shoulders, and this time it slid down the staircase, bumping along until it hit bottom where it tumbled, end over end, and crashed into the sideboard. The vase rocked back and forth, then slowly tipped and fell. For a second, Becky hoped that it might not break. But then it hit the floor, and Becky heard it shatter as it broke into pieces of thick, ocean-colored glass. She ran down the stairs.

In the yard, Nathaniel watched Joshua build a mountain out of mud and cedar bark, then stack his army men on top. He stood up and looked east. He could just make out the barn of the Dailey farm, and he wondered when it would come down. Tom hadn’t moved out yet, but it was only a matter time. Tom Dailey was made an offer, like Nathaniel was, even though he farmed raspberries, Nathaniel blueberries. It didn’t matter. They were going to plow most of it over (along with the four other farms they’d bought out), re-irrigate, build a processing shed. It’ll be an eyesore, he thought, but he couldn’t blame Tom for selling. His wife had cancer, they had bills.

The night Tom had come over to break the news, the two men had sat on the front porch steps drinking cans of Hamm’s and looking out into the front yard. They talked about the drought of ’87, bee mites, the new insecticides, before they talked about the specifics of the sale, the dates and prices and costs. Midway through his third beer, Tom said, “And it’s not like there’s anyone else to take over.” He pushed the bill of his hat up and looked out into the front yard. “Davey is at State, but I know he’s not coming back to Sisters, and Jessica is talking about moving to California.” He took a pull from the beer. “Better to get out now, anyways,” he said. “It’ll be good for me to retire a little early.”

Nathaniel nodded. “You’ll finally be able to take Sylvia on that cruise now.”

Tom took a drink from his beer, then held it out at an angle and peered into it, as though he were trying to measure how much was left. He stretched his lips into a thin smile. “Won’t she be glad,” he finally said.

What Nathaniel remembered now, as he memorized the roofline of the barn, was how they had sat on the porch until dark, until Becky moved from room to room turning on lamps, until they were cubed by the shadow and light cast from the window panes behind them.

*tm

Work in Progress

(edited April 2007: if you want to read this story, entitled "Notes to Self on The Appropriate Uses of Humor," email me).