There are things that get resolved, and then there are things that don’t. Michael and Jason are, and have always been, once of those that don’t. They are brothers, you could say, but they don’t like thinking of themselves that way. They prefer referring to the fourteen years they lived in the same house together as a situational accident that nobody could have predicted and, thus, prevented.
They shared a mother, it’s true. They didn’t share fathers. If that were the only problem they had… well, things probably wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. But they did, and things are the way they are now, and that’s that.
Of course, both Jason and Michael don’t realize how ridiculously similar they are. It’s inevitable, you might say, that brothers who live in the same tumultuous household for fourteen years end up using the same turns of phrases, or, taking shots of vodka with the same exact swoop and shake of the head as the burn goes down. It’s inevitable, you might say, and you might be right, but the thing is that Jason and Michael spent most of their time during those fourteen years trying their hardest to be as different as people with similar genes could be. Sure, alright, maybe not all fourteen years were spent that way. There must have been a few years, at the beginning there, after Jason was born, when they weren’t around each other all that much because one of them was in preschool and the other was at their mother’s breast. There must have been a while when Jason even looked up to Michael, and maybe wanted, in a vague and faraway kind of way, to be like him.
But the thing is, Jason got over that awfully fast. It wasn’t just that Michael tormented him, although that must have played a factor. It wasn’t only that right from the start the boys had incredibly different temperaments. No, there was something deeper there, something mysterious and unknown, and it was this that forced them apart. Trying to get them to play nicely together was like trying to force the minus sides of batteries to touch each other. It was like telling the moon to go and dance with the sun for a while. Their mother gave up pretty soon on the idea of their ever being friends.
Then she gave up on them altogether.
Here are some of the things that Jason and Michael have in common now. Neither one of them blames their mother for any of the problems in their lives. They both use the same exact sentence when they try to describe her to people: She had a hard time of it, they say. Other people try, some less tactfully than others, to call BS, but neither one of the brothers will accept any criticism. They see her every weekend – Jason on Saturdays and Michael on Sundays – and they bring her flowers and they kiss her cheek and they look at her with eyes that seem to have regressed to tender childhood, and they don’t blame her.
Another sentiment they have in common is this idea of utter and complete independence. If anyone tries to help them into a parking place, for instance, they will get very annoyed, very quickly. When they’re sick, they pretend they’re not and show up for work anyway. They insist on lifting heavy things for their significant others, even now that they’ve both got the beginnings of bad backs, and cling to this chauvinistic notion of chivalry as an unbreakable rule.
Even their taste in music is similar. If they talked more often – ever, really – they might realize that they’d both drifted away from the vastly different and extreme genres that they used to like and have both fallen in love, at a later stage in life than most people do, with the tuneless musical poetry of Bob Dylan. But they don’t talk, so they have no idea.
Their significant others tried meeting each other for coffee once. They both had a vague notion that it would be a good idea to somehow intervene, perhaps even initiate some sort of reconciliation between the brothers. But an hour into their conversation, the two women were angrier with each other than they’d ever been with either Jason or Michael. They parted bitterly, each of them convinced, for the first time, that her partner had a reason for acting the way he did.
Jason and Michael don’t talk. I wonder, sometimes, whether they’d even recognize each other now. In the grocery store, for instance. If they both reached for the same pack of frozen fish fingers of that brand that their mother always bought.
family
Rick’s Tracks
Rick had always been short, round and bespectacled. He started wearing glasses when he was two years old; he looked like a little owl in the photos on his mother’s mantelpiece. By the time he was six, his father began worrying about his rotund qualities and tried to get him interested in sports of all kinds. Rick took every kind of class that was offered at the community center, from karate to swimming, but he always ended up crying and, somehow or other, with broken glasses. His mother grew tired of buying him new glasses and refused to sign him up for any more classes. Instead, his father tried to get him involved in the peewee teams at his elementary school, but that didn’t’ work either. Rick was always gently taken off any team he was on when he was found, elbows on knees, staring at a caterpillar rather than paying any attention at all to the game.
It was no use. Rick simply wouldn’t become the son that his parents had thought they would have. But unlike many unlucky little boys and girls, Rick had parents who loved him and learned to accept him. Rick himself was a cheerful and dreamy child and never seemed to quite realize that his parents had been disappointed in him for a time. He grew up happily, finding friends among the other quieter kids, entertaining himself with adventure books and building blocks, and pleasing his parents with his good report cards.
Of course, little children grow up, even if they read Peter Pan over and over again. Rick stood by the train tracks nervously, fiddling with a ragged piece of tissue between his fingers and dabbing his nose absentmindedly every few seconds and thought back on his life. The bad things, he decided, must have begun around middle school.
Talking to a Chair
“Mommy-Mommy-Mommy-Mommy-Mommy!” The shouts got steadily louder, accompanied by what seemed like an elephant pounding along the second floor hallway and down the stairs. It was amazing that a six-year-old could make quite so much noise.
Greer took a deep breath, trying to keep her temper. The kitchen table was littered with receipts and she felt as if they were all ganging up on her, trying deliberately to bamboozle her into making another calculation mistake and needing to start all over again.
“Mommy!” Rebecca stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“I think they heard you in China.” Greer sighed and took off her reading glasses. They made her head ache. “What is it?”
“If you heard me, why didn’t you answer?” Becca shifted her weight to one leg and tapped the other foot. Greer fought down a laugh; it was a gesture her daughter must have picked up from her, and it looked precociously adorable. But Becca hated being laughed at and saw herself as a very grown-up little girl. Greer remembered, vaguely, that she too hadn’t liked the feeling of being just a kid and therefore unworthy of being taken seriously.
“Because I’m working on taxes and I need to concentrate. If you needed me, I knew you’d come down here and talk to me like a civilized person instead of shouting all over the house. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Rebecca dropped the pose and took the chair opposite her mother. “I dreamed about Daddy.”
“Oh, Becca… Was it a nice dream?”
“No. But Daddy was in it. So it wasn’t only bad.”
“Was Daddy nice?”
“Yes. He hugged me.”
Greer played with a pen, needing something in her hands to stop her from reaching out to Becca, because she didn’t like being touched unless she initiated it. The therapist said that children could develop these kinds of aversions, and Greer knew she needed to respect her daughter’s boundaries, but it was so hard, sometimes, not to be able to hug her whenever she wanted and smell her usually messy hair and remember how once there had been another smell beside it that belonged to the body hugging the girl from the other side and making a Becca-sandwich.
“Can I help?” Becca asked, picking up a long, half rolled grocery receipt and pulling it tightly around her finger.
“Thanks, but no. Why don’t you bring your spelling book in here, though?”
“Okay.”
Greer didn’t believe in heaven, so she looked at the chair that he’d sat in during dinner every night and spoke to it instead of looking up. “I hope you can see her. She’s only six and she wants to help me do my taxes. I really hope you can see her right now. You’d love her more than ever.”
The Greensword Tales
Most stories begin at the beginning. Some begin in the middle. But I go by the lesson my Auntie Greta drummed into me all those years when it was just her and me in that little house off the highway. We didn’t have a TV, and our electricity came from this old generator. Point is, there wasn’t much entertainment besides the books we got at the library or taking walks in the woods, but leaving the house at all – whether to pick up new books or find a new trail – was dependent on the weather, and that was a tricky, fickle thing.
So my Auntie Greta told me stories, and she taught me how to tell them too. She taught me that sometimes beginning at the end is more efficient. This story, for instance, began with the end. Auntie Greta and me – we’re the last survivors of the sprawling Greensword family, and our story begins hundreds of years ago. I know as many tales and legends about our family as Auntie Greta does, and maybe a few more since I learned to use the computers at the library and managed to find out some other stories people tell about us.
But out of the dozens of stories Auntie Greta and I told each other, there’s only one that really meant something to us. It was our story; the story of living with the knowledge that we were the last of our kind and that there would be no more. Let me tell you, that was some burden to bear. We’re still living it, Auntie Greta and I. Our story is the ending of a long epic, but it’s not over quite yet.
Flight
Flying was not new to Gretchen Mckenna, but it was always wonderful. Adjusting herself, she wheeled to the right, feeling the leap in her stomach as the small craft dipped and caught the next thermal. Her feet resting on a poll behind her, at the bottom of the wingspan, and she felt the inevitable itch that she always seemed to get on her calf at some point during flight. She forced her mind away from it and concentrated on watching the fields below her for a convenient place to land. She didn’t want to flatten a whole row of beautiful corn plants if she could help it.
The sky was a magnificent blue above her, and it seemed impossible that below, on the ground, there was anything wrong with the world. She wondered perversely whether it would be possible to simply exist without any human companionship; maybe then she’d never, ever, need to be exposed to the meanness, the smallness, the pettiness, the stupidity and callousness of those around her. She knew that a fifteen-year old girl shouldn’t be as negative and as done with life as she felt she was already, and she was guilty about that.
If she’d been at all suicidal, she could have snapped herself out of her harness and fallen to her death any time during this and all her other flights. But she had a deep will to live and find something better, something worth living for. She was determined to find it. The family she was born into was all wrong for her; they were bigots, they spurned any kind of education and laughed at her pleasure in reading, they encouraged her to be a “normal” girl and go out to parties where she would get plied with alcohol and lewd offers. There weren’t parents or siblings like she had in most of the books she checked out of the small, rural library that she spent her time in.
A draft carried a scent of damp earth from below and Gretchen realized her mind had wandered and she was getting closer to the ground in her circling. She found an empty expanse of weedy field to land in. She wasn’t looking forward to the long trudge home, lugging the surprisingly heavy craft behind her, but she dreaded even more arriving home and hearing her family berate her for being gone all day, again.
One day, she thought, I’ll fly away for real.
Family Time
My school has this weird thing called “October Study Days,” two days off which we’re supposed to use to study. Of course, what that actually means is that we get a long weekend in lieu of an official fall break, and we use it to either a) go home for a bit, b) party every night or c) get some work done (and still, most likely, party every night).
Option (a) is out for me because home, which is at the moment where I grew up, is halfway round the world or so. Option (b) is out because I don’t particularly like partying. Option (c) would have been what I would have chosen if I had to stay on campus.
But I’ve concocted option (d) which is this: d) go visit brother in D.C and get the eff off campus for a while.
So I’m going on a mini-vacation, during which I still have a ton of reading and writing to do. But I’ll have some relaxation time as well, which will be lovely and much needed at the moment (as you may have noticed from my all too frequent melancholy posts of late).
How’s fall shaping up for all of you?
Memory+
My grandparents’ house has always been, and still is, my greatest place of comfort. Now it is a mere memory, one that I will never get to experience in reality again, and there are days when I feel crippled with grief because of that fact. Today was one of those days. I was standing in the shower, letting the hot water stream over my limbs – I had just gotten back from the gym and was feeling my muscles loosen up pleasantly – when I felt, for a moment, as if I were standing in the shower-stall at my grandparents’ place. They had two bathrooms, but the showers in each were identical. The water stream wasn’t very hard, but there was always hot water, no matter what. Incredibly, the same is true of my dorm.
As I stood there, I let my mind flow back through time and imagined what it would be like if I were transported back into one of my memories. I saw myself, younger, stepping out of the shower and wrapping myself up in one of the fluffy towels that had monograms stitched into them. I would then get dressed while the heater blasted loudly onto me and helped me dry quickly. I’d get a shiver when I came out of the bathroom, because the house was always air-conditioned. I would still have a hair towel resting over my shoulders so that my long hair wouldn’t get my shirt wet. I’d walk through the rooms (in this fantasy, everyone was out doing something) and find wherever I’d left my book. I’d make myself two slices of toast and spread peanut-butter thickly on them, and eat them fast while the peanut-butter was still melting into the bread. I’d then maybe take a piece of Entenmann’s chocolate fudge cake and eat it slowly. All this, you understand, while reading one of the books I’d recently purchased at Barnes & Noble.
I’d take the book into my bedroom and read, with the birds making noise outside. I might let myself fall asleep, wake up and read, fall asleep again. I would wake up to find my mother and my aunt sitting outside, by the pool, smoking and watching the sunset as they talked of everything. I’d settle next to them, maybe with a cup of hot-chocolate in the old sippy-cup that I always drank out of there, and let their words wash over me. Once in a while, I might say something clever and make them laugh.
We might take a walk down the street to see the twinkling lights of the city. Or we might be going out to dinner with my great-uncle and his family. Or perhaps we would simply stay in, play word-games or watch a film. Maybe they would do something else while I would go watch episodes of Roseanne on Nick@Nite.
I opened my eyes. I was at college, in the shower, with a limp yellow curtain instead of a glass-door beside me. I am twenty-one and have gone through five cycles of mourning – perhaps six, since I considered the sale of the house that my imagination took me to as a death in its own right. I am confused, obsessive, anxious and often depressed. These are facts that I cannot alter.
But – and this is an important “but” – I have the comfort of knowing that I will always hold memories sacredly, and will never wish to ignore the past. After all, the past can help the present feel a little bit better. As I smoothed my wet hair back and shut the water off in the shower, I felt a longing open up a hole within me, but it also exuded warmth that has kept my heart thumping all day long.
Nothing’s Wrong [Short Story]
The fragrance of fresh bread woke Thomas up one morning. He leaped out of bed excitedly, knowing what the smell signified. It meant that Uncle had come for a visit.
Thomas was six years old, and he could tell, with the instinct that all young children share, that his father liked Uncle a lot, but that his mother didn’t, even though Uncle was her brother. Thomas didn’t know why his mother didn’t like Uncle, but he sensed that it had to do with Uncle being a baker. He thought that maybe bakers weren’t as good as bankers, which is what his mother was. Thomas thought that being a baker was much nicer; Uncle wore comfy clothes and always smelled good, whereas Thomas’s mother always complained about her pantyhose and put too much perfume on.
Uncle was tall and skinny, but this morning, when Thomas went downstairs, he thought that Uncle had become like Flat Stanley, the flat boy that they were reading about in school. The illusion passed, and Thomas realized that it was only that Uncle looked even thinner than usual. He looked gaunt, although Thomas didn’t know that word, and he looked worn out and weary, more words that Thomas didn’t really understand.
“Morning, Tom-Tom.”
“Hi! What’s wrong, Uncle?”
“Drink your milk. Eat. We don’t want you to be late for school.” Thomas’s mother pushed a plate of eggs and a glass of milk at him without looking at Uncle at all. Then she swept right out of the room again, and Thomas and Uncle looked at each other as they hear Thomas’s parents yelling at each other upstairs. Uncle got up and checked on the bread in the oven. Whenever he came to visit, he’d let himself in very early and would bake fresh bread that would be ready for the family’s breakfast when they awoke.
“Here you go,” Uncle said, pulling the bread-pan out of the oven. He cut a thick, still steaming slice, and put it on Thomas’s plate. “Eat up.”
Thomas wasn’t going to give up on his question, though. “What’s wrong, Uncle?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Uncle smiled.
In the car on the way to school, Thomas asked his mother the same question. “Nothing,” she said. “Why? Has Uncle said anything?”
That evening, Thomas tried again. He went into the bathroom where his father was drying off after a shower and began to swing from side to side while holding the doorknob.
“Stop that, you’ll break it,” his father said, without much conviction. Thomas kept swinging.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?”
“Well. What did Mommy tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“And Uncle?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh dear. That must mean that whatever’s wrong, it’s a big deal. Listen, bub, you and I – we shouldn’t get involved, okay?”
“Okay,” Thomas said. But when he went to bed that night, he couldn’t help feeling scared by what his father had said. It sounded like his father didn’t know what was wrong either. If nobody knew what was wrong, then what would happen now? For the first time in months, Thomas had nightmares and wet the bed.
The Town and the North [Flash Fiction]
Once upon a time, there were train tracks. Along the tracks, somewhere midway between their beginning and end, was a town. It was small and rustic and old, the kind of town where you married the boy you played with when you were four and grew up to be just like your grandparents, grumpily proclaiming that things were different in your day, even though they really weren’t. It was the kind of town that few people left, and if they did leave, you knew they weren’t going to come back. It was the kind of town that could fulfill your dreams; your dreams were small and simple because you didn’t really believe there was a whole world outside of the town, a world where you could do something different than what your parents did before you. It was the kind of town that killed any aspirations you had above your station and strangled your imagination because it interfered with what you were supposed to do to make your family proud.
Nobody in the town knew what the train tracks were. The train that had once run along the edge of town had been diverted to a different route so long ago that nobody in living memory even knew what exactly a train looked like. The children in the town knew that if they ever worked up the courage to leave, they would follow the tracks. On long summer days, they dared each other to go farther and farther down the tracks, always turning away with frightened giggles when they reached Old Gabby’s farm a little outside town. Everyone knew that Old Gabby was crazy and that his dogs were vicious, and whenever the children heard the barks, they would lose their nerve.
They never went the other way down the tracks. That way, North, lay something more frightening than dogs and crazy old men, something that parents didn’t even need to warn their children about; the kids learned quickly enough that when they tried to go North, their skin began to prickle, their hair stood up on their arms, and the world seemed to darken. Nobody every talked about it. It was the kind of town that didn’t like to voice certain things.
That became a problem when one day in late autumn, a woman ran into town from the North and fell, panting and red-faced, onto the mayor’s porch. She managed to scratch a word in the snow before she passed out: “Help.”
A Pleasant Surprise – A Writer’s Tale
I tell people that I write. Because I do. But I have a hard time calling myself a writer. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone I was an author, either, even though I’m working on my third novel right now.
However, I just had one of the coolest writing experiences I’ve ever had, and one which I’m eager to remember in years to come. Which is why I’m writing a second blog post today, something I rarely, if ever, do. Ready? My tale might not be exciting to anyone who isn’t me, but here goes.
My current work in progress includes some six main characters. I wrote the first ten pages of it about a year ago, in this blog in fact [if you’re interested, search for “Mr. and Mrs. Adams,” “Amanda,” and “Heather.”] During my semester at Sarah Lawrence this year, I took a writing class, and began to write this novel in earnest.
About five months ago, I wrote a scene in which Amanda, one of my characters, is drunk and having a breakdown of sorts. She has never been drunk before, is introverted, is scared of her own passions and hides behind her instincts as a caregiver much of the time. As the listener, she can remain safe and closed off while still maintaining meaningful relationships with people she cares about.
Now, this scene I wrote so many months ago was, I knew, going to fit in only towards the very end of the novel. I haven’t looked at the scene in months, waiting for the right time to go back to it and insert it where I wanted it to go. The day before yesterday, I was writing the scene that I knew would directly precede it, in which Amanda’s friend makes her a drink, and Amanda, for the first time ever, decides to be reckless and takes it.
In the scene I wrote the other day, I had her friend making her a White Russian. The next scene I wrote was about other characters. Today, I wanted to put in the scene I’d written all those months ago, and so I scrolled to the very bottom of my file to reread it and see what I was going to have to change. And here’s the kicker. I’d written there that Amanda was drunk on “milky White Russians.”
!!!
I had NO IDEA that I’d specified in that scene what she’d been drinking! I didn’t remember AT ALL that I’d already had the idea of what I wanted her to be drunk on! When I’d written the scene a couple days ago, I’d decided to go for White Russians because I thought it was the kind of yummy alcoholic drink that her friend would mix in order to lure Amanda into drinking!
But it seems that Amanda told me ages ago that she wanted her first experience with alcohol to be with this particular drink. It seems that even her friend, a relatively minor side-character, knew in February already that she was going to make Amanda a White Russian for her first alcoholic beverage. It seems that I know my characters even better than I thought, or else that they’ve been driving me to write what they feel is the truth for them.
So. Maybe not the most exciting tale for anyone who hasn’t had the experience of their writing taking on a life of its own. But let me tell you, I’m going to be grinning about this revelation all day long.
EDIT: Another thing – in this same scene, written months ago, I’d mentioned homesickness for her mother. In a scene I wrote about a week ago, Amanda was missing her father and feeling homesick. So yeah, I think Amanda is really quite alive in my mind. Which is exciting.
Slightly Ignorant 