Essay a Day #7: Song's Over

Thanks to Alex for his Essay-a-Day post today, which served as a launch pad for this... (Go read his, too. Fair is fair.)

Pulling my mother-made quilt over me the other night, the bedroom window letting in the nipping-but-still-tolerable October air, what made me think of that day? There are no potential romances in my life these days, no dances, and only the standard level of middle-school politics, so what brain filter fingers over every other possibility in three decades of memory and finds this one? Why is it held so pristinely, as though I might get a better price for it one day, it being in such mint condition?

I hardly knew him--knew him as little as you can know someone in eighth grade when there are thirty kids in the class. And he wasn't one of us long-timers--I hadn't fingerpainted with him or shared a copy of Where the Red Fern Grows. He had scarcely been on my radar. I cannot, in fact, find one other memory of him but this.

What is it about shame that sears one memory into you, burning up others?

I don't remember the color of the balloons or the song that was playing, I don't remember my dress or his--likely not suit, not at an eighth grade graduation dance. Whatever he was wearing, I cannot picture. I remember only laughing. Sitting with Meghan, a part-time friend at best, waiting while Alison spun the floor with yet another guy. This was the usual--the times when Meghan and I were at our closest, I suppose. We were laughing over something, so much that I didn't notice him until he was there, impossibly taller than seated me.

And he asked me to dance.

I glanced at Meghan, and put my hand to my chest as I turned. (I hate that this is true. I wanted to leave it out but I can't. I hate that in this second my Disney-indoctrinated head pressed this gesture--Aurora's, I think--into my hand. I hate that this is what he saw as he began laughing: a pretend princess. This is what I hate, out of everything.)

And he laughed. "Damn," he says, already shooting a half-glance to the four or five guys I hadn't noticed, a distance away but not out of earshot. "Song's over." And he has the grace to hold in most of the laugh until his back is turned. He is walking back to them, and as I turn back to Meghan (hand dropped, hand loathed, hand in danger of being removed from body) I see the beginnings of back-slaps and arm-punches.

I don't remember her words, but I remember loving Meghan for that night. I don't remember if we stayed or left. I remember Alison coming back to the table, telling her, holding her back from marching across the room to the boys. And abruptly the film reel cuts out.

I don't know why I have this perfectly-kept memory, when a thousand others would be better. (Not nicer--I have lots of sad, painful, awful memories, but they serve a purpose. What does this one do but to bring me back to a 15-year-old girl who wanted to be anyone else but what she was?

There's one other flash of memory connected to this: maybe two months later, I am at Cape Cod. I have bought postcards for friends, and for the first time have included Meghan among them. I don't remember what else I write, save, "Thanks for being a friend when Tim was a jackass."

I don't know why I hold on to it. I never saw Tim again after the next day's graduation, and Meghan and I fell out of touch after high school. If I could let it go, I would. But maybe it's important to remember these things. Maybe we have to remember there are jackasses in the world--but friends at the table, too.

Essay a Day #6: Brainstorming Under a Lunar Eclipse

I am trying to catch words for this post--an opening hook or a central idea, a turn of phrase that curls and presses into my tongue and throat like a friendly, neighborhood, beneficial tapeworm. But each flicker I see--fish moving below the surface, the sun glinting off their mercuried backs--is too quick to catch. I seem to have it, but at the last instant it slides away and back and down.

I have read other people's words tonight, hoping to find some to snare and steal. I have wandered down other people's stories or tripped over their grammar, and neither has produced that glint, the certainty that looks straight through the blank whiteness of an empty page, already seeing the words that will be fruitful and multiply.

And that, at the end of the day, is what I want: words that pour and froth and flow, words that create more words almost unaided. The soundtrack of a writer on a roll: the flackering sound of keys falling hard upon themselves or the manic scrape of pen and paper over the slide of the palm. The satisfaction of needing a second page--feeling the curl and roll under your fingers or seeing the new screen flash out below like a well-lit lunar field, empty and perfect and in need of footprints.

I wonder which I value more--the words themselves (the stories and epiphanies and secrets) or the feeling I have putting them down. The sigh at finding the right closing line. The way my tongue sneaks out of the corner of my mouth as I desperately flit through my mental files to choose "implore" over "ask." My smirk when I choose to make up a word rather than choose a perfectly good real one.

And the finality--clicking "Publish," or pressing the notebook closed. The knowledge that this is work I have done. And the knowing that the same work--same and different--will still be waiting, waiting again, tomorrow.

Essay a Day #5: Baptism

Long before the official one, at the back of the platform in front of the small crowd of Cornerstone Baptist, I had a childhood baptism. It held no spirituality for me at the time, but I feel like Jesus enjoyed it it as much, and likely more, than the scheduled and pristine and prepared-for ceremony. What better example do I have, after all, of childlike faith than that of a six-year-old plunging into icy waves, eyes screwed shut even as she thrashes (equal parts joy and terror) away from one set of arms, sure despite her senses that another one waits for her?

(Geez. Seriously, I could unpack that all day.)

It's the only "first" I remember my father being around for. I'm sure he was there for first steps and words, but afterwards would he perhaps feel the reality of his absence most keenly in those missed moments? I can still hear his voice--cannot see his face because I doubt I turned to look at him--imploring me to read to him on one of my visits, but what had been a showboating skill even weeks before had faded to a certain commonplaceness, and with the efficiency of a child I assured him I didn't need to.

But on this day, after months of splashing-but-clinging to adults, to docks, to floaties, this I remember. In his eagerness, perhaps, to witness at least one last first, he shamelessly bribed me with a Gifford's brownie sundae. With such a prize, the dozen feet of frothy waves between my brother and him seemed still noble and fearsome but worth the risk. We took a few more steps out, so there could be no element of my boosting up from the sand, and then: the sharp cold, even in summer, turning my skin to steel; the sound of distant gulls and unintelligible urging words and gurgling earfuls of water; briny, chalky sea finding ways through my mouth and nose; the simultaneous feeling of surging forward and barely maintaining float. And then another set of arms. Cheers. Laughter. Triumph.

Of course I don't really remember most of this. I remember the bribe, and a blurred Polaroid-memory of the two men and me and the sea. I don't remember the sundae so much as a dim, not-good feeling having to do with my mother--what an older me would identify as guilt, that I had done this great thing without her, most important in my life.

I can easily imagine the rest of those sensory vestiges and more: how the sweet ice cream would fight with the salt still on my lips and tongue, or sitting in the back seat feeling the wind twist my wet hair into a stringy sculpture. I can feel all these things because, after everything else--after being left and wounded and only receiving words of pretended normalcy--this is where I have settled. Such a strange thing, life is: I moved here because he had left it for yet another state, but the longer I stay the more I find connections back to him. For eight years to the day I have carved a home here on the very surf where my smaller self fought for breath and control and found her father's arms.

And that was not a first but a last.

I find myself wondering if he held that memory carefully, polishing it with his palms like a stone, keeping the dull blur of time at bay. I hold this same stone, and while a younger me would have skipped it into waves or laid it at his own carved stone, I press warmth into it until I can hear the surf and the laughter.

These are a different kind of firsts, of triumphs--to take the shards that might have cut us and wear them smooth with our hands.

Essay a Day #4: Gretchen, Magic, Soup

I'm not a day late--it's really more like 12 hours. If I can get in another post this afternoon, we're all caught up. (Let's not investigate the size of that "if.")


The type-perfect words on the page are so few that, upon opening the book you remember again that you shouldn't even bother opening the book.


Gretchen's Potato Soup

4 potatoes, peeled & chunked
1 onion

Just cover the potatoes with water. Add salt and pepper. Mash slightly once cooked. Add milk, cream, or half & half. Add dumplings and bring to boil.
(Dumplings: 2 eggs, 5 T. flour. Mix well, then drizzle slowly into simmering soup.)


Reading it, a stranger would page past. It's too simple, nearly unappetizing. There's no glossy picture to snag the attention. And there are those home-kitchen-recipe mysteries that make my heart rate rise: where do the onions go? Why isn't the half & half listed in the ingredients? What, exactly, is "chunked"?

In my cookbook, though, it's one of the most worn pages, watermarked with oil and spattered like a just-begun Jackson Pollack. But a stranger would page on, because they wouldn't smell the steel pot, full, resting on the back burner, kept warm until we arrived. The wouldn't feel the steam piling off the earthenware bowl onto your face like a hot towel. They wouldn't see the thick, creamy soup clinging to the spoon, too thick to drip. And the taste--I don't have metaphors for that. It was home, and history, and simplicity, and much. As a child, I hated soup, but I would scrape clean bowl after bowl of Gretchen's.

I am not a stranger. I know intimately the soup and its maker. She would make me lemon milk and honey (how did she keep it from curdling?) when I was sick, and gasp with delight when she saw me, and tell me stories and slice an impossibly indulgent wedge of torte onto a gleaming orange plate (I can still smell it, cold and sweet and perfect). As a teenager, I would hover next to her at the stove, taking meticulous notes: the lengths of time, the size of the "chunked," the method for dumplings. But returning home, replicating with precision, my soup was nowhere close to hers. Edible--good, even--but not Gretchen's.

Because hers was more than potatoes. Her heritage was one of barely getting by, of making a meal from old potatoes and water, and she had long-since internalized that stone-soup magic of making such starkness into something generous. I, a child who knew only a pale want, had never known real hunger, could not recognize the spells and potions of a wartime German immigrant raising other people's children, cooking other people's meals.

I still can't make her soup. I follow the recipe religiously, or I add browned onions and rosemary and bacon, and it tastes good, and friends savor and sigh, but it is not hers. I serve cake generously--the orange plate now lives in my cabinet, and that is its primary purpose: to give, to extend, to share. But no written recipes can tell you how to mash the potatoes just so they cream into the soup, or how to lace the layers of torte with just enough brandy to make the flavor linger in the sinuses. How to make someone feel loved and contented before they've finished the first bite.

So why keep the recipe? Why turn the page to the back and white outline when I know the real secret doesn't live there? Maybe to remind myself that this is how things are passed down--food, stories, identity--with some words, yes, but also white space. Good magic. Love.

Essay a Day #3: In Rooms with Women

(posted on EaD 10/3 -- Blogger ate the posting here!)

In about nine hours, I will walk into a house slightly bubbling over with cooing aunts and white tulle. The women will laugh--no, titter--and play games our grandmothers played and squeal and clap gloved hands. Foods will be in miniature, as will the serving pieces. Every other woman there will have been long-married, and they will give the bride half-baked advice laced with unsubtle comments about the general uselessness of men. 

Of course it won't be that bad. I know it won't be that bad. I'm sure no one will be wearing gloves. The tittering will be kept to a dull roar. I'll probably even like the games. But this is what my brain does when a girly thing is in my immediate life path. I know it's silly, absurd even, but it happens nonetheless--for every cell of brain that says, "Relax, it's going to be fine," there are two saying, "but you'd rather stay home and watch Braveheart." . . .

[So this was, originally, a real essay--a more-than-two-paragraphs essay. But Blogger has elected to dissolve it mysteriously (dang logocidal Cloud), sooooo I guess we'll just leave it as it. Maybe I'll flesh it out again when I'm less ticked...]

Essay a Day #2: She & Me

It's strange--funny--fitting--how undifferent I am from her. As though I am a bystander, I can see her, albeit in low definition: the overlarge feet propped on the table, the hips hidden in the box-like chair, Seventeen magazine splayed over angled (but, more than that, rounded) knees. Head down. Defenses up.

Hearing this song now--"She would change everything for happy ever after"--two near-simultaneous sighs hit me: the first is that of a woman who will never be 14 again, who would not turn the pages back to 1998 for a thousand good things; the second is that of the 14-year-old who is still here, the girl who is less changed than she thought she'd be nearly two decades later years later.

In a weird flash of imagination (powered by a few too many Doctor Who episodes) the 14-year-old, ensconced in her comfort zone, evaluates the newly arrived thirtysomething uncomfortably scanning books on the shelf the way adults do when in the lair of adolescents--distracted but not. She has not thinned out the way everyone said she would--everyone said she would, and that is just not fair--but her hair is better and while traces of acne remain, the face is more smooth than scarred. She has learned to dress better, though hints of her never-caught high school trends remain: jeans that brush the ground, shirts that fall to her hips, statement earrings. She wears glasses now. Strange. When did that happen? The teenager squints, swipes at her nose. But there is no denying this is the same woman; her height helps to distinguish, but see too how she pulls her bottom lip up when she smiles to hide the unpretty teeth--dead giveaway. She'd recognize that anywhere.

The thirtysomething, her attention caught, angles her eye over the book to refresh her memory. Is it any wonder this girl would earn an English degree, when her high school hangouts were the theater and here, the second floor of the library, perched between the six and seven hundreds of Dewey. The pictures in the magazine--impossibly long-legged girls with gloss-shined lips and platform-inverted feet--taunt her in secret years before she would learn they taunted everyone, even the glossy, the leggy. She is here because there are other people here--not friends, but a passing glance would make it seem so. She shows a studied relaxation, but it is too stilted to be real. It will buckle at the shift of any number of variables. It's nearly painful to watch.

 Love yourself, the thirtysomething wills across the room, the book settling back on the shelf. Stop being certain that you are an object of amusement. Stop playing a role and free yourself. Walk across campus without a crowd. Be funny for the sake of making yourself laugh. Take ownership of those words that scrape and sting--fat, awkward, poor--or take their sting from them. Find those small powers you have (of words, of compassion) and exercise them.

Because this woman you so ache to become is already sitting there with that magazine. She's wrapped up in those adolescent layers as much as anyone, but she is already peeling back and discarding the pieces that don't work anymore. She will become the girl with the notebook full of quotes, the girl who forgives her father, the girl who falls in love and loses but doesn't die, the artsy girl with confidence built from grace. She will blush less and laugh more and stand instead of leaning. She will not be perfect--and she will in some ways bear no resemblance to this dream-adult you're aiming for, but she'll find those dreams were ones you grow out of the way you used to love Prince Philip but now it's Rider Strong or nothing.

If I could only crouch down, rest my chin on the arm of the chair to whisper to her. But that's part of the deal, isn't it? We wait for our own selves. There's no rushing, no shortcuts. She will find these things to be true, but no sooner, no easier than I did the first time. How do I still remember that first walk alone (insignificant and huge, remembered so perfectly), when the only sound in the world was my hurrying feet in the grass and I was sure every window was filled with eyes. Arriving into class, I regulated my breathing to find that no one had noticed. I remember knowing that he was leaving and in love with someone else--and months later seeing him and feeling only a tinny reverb of old emotion. A teacher looking me in the eyes and saying, "You do this well. Do it more. Never stop." Standing in front of a graduation crowd speaking, laughing, hearing their laughter echo back. Nearly indiscernible steps toward a new (but not as new as I'd imagined) version of me.

The teenager looks up again from the magazine to find that the thirtysomething is gone--sort of. She thought she was talking to her, but it must have been voices from downstairs. A song flits out on the edge of her head, almost heard: "She's just the way she is, but no one's told her that's okay." Weird. She shrugs, and turns the page.

Endnotes:

- the song is Jon McLaughlin's "Beautiful Disaster." It's fantastic, and it's written, I'm quite sure, about every teenage girl ever. Listen to it here.

- seriously, Rider Strong. It's not too late to make this work. Call me.

Essay a Day, #1: Stealing Other People's Stories

Drafter's Note: Hey, friends! I'm embarking on a semi-awesome, semi-terrifying challenge with some new writing cohorts over at Essay a Day: writing one essay (in whatever format/style that takes) each day for the month of October. Let's do this thing... DAY ONE:

All my Oscars have been for screenwriting. 

I’m reasonably sure this is true. 

Maybe way back, back before I traded in my plans of acting for a stage manager’s headset and binder, maybe I accepted a few for acting. But the overwhelming majority of my wins have been for writing stories that were filled in with famous faces and spread thickly across screens in dark rooms full of strangers.

[Sidebar: While it can be awkward, I’ve found the bathroom is the best place for accepting. The steamy mirror creates a glow similar to that of stage lights; your wet hair is easily swept into something classic or cutting edge; the towel can be cinched to sveltify the waist and press the girls into some sort of cleavage. I’ve done a lot of research, and this is where I’m coming down in the discussion: bathrooms are best.]

I’ve only occasionally wavered--while stepping over the thank-yous and nods of honor to the vanquished peers--on which award I held. I’ve typically accepted for Original Screenplay--it seemed purer, more mine. Adapted would do only if it was from my own book. To take someone else’s work, dicing and forcing it into lines of dialogue and scenery, seemed cheating.* But it’s in the tripping over details that you remember it’s just shower steam. The orchestra would have long-since played you off the stage (screenwriters get no extra time, we all know). Your former microphone slices through your perfectly--ehh, uniquely, anyway--swept hair, and it falls into its everydayness. As do your breasts. And waist.

The details had always seemed pretty secure, freeing me up to focus on hair and cleavage. But I went to see a movie last night--just an ordinary movie, but I’d just finished the source-material novel a few weeks ago, and I was so sure I was going to growl at the adaptation (as good English majors always do) but instead... It was adapted. A better word might be perfected. It was like somebody read this mediocre novel and said, “For a rough draft, not bad.” And went in and removed that stupid characterization and fixed the bit with the sister-in-law. And (with the inarguable help of a casting director to be reckoned with) utterly nailed it. 

And for the first time, far from my fogged mirror and hairbrush, I actually, really get the good-artists-steal thing. Because every rewrite is its own creation and every revision is a first breath. We all wear hand-me-down words, phrases found at the second-hand store or buried in Mom’s closet. Nothing is pure, no words are mine. And that’s more than okay--it’s an opportunity: to remake, refashion, redraft, re--- everything.

This silly, unimportant, forgettable movie has me rethinking more than just who I’m wearing. Already I’m fingering through the mental files of stories I wished were better, characters I wanted different endings for. Stealing? Certainly. Bettering? That remains to be seen. I hope so. 

Because--oh man. This is such a shock. I--who are we kidding, I was hoping for this, but I can’t believe I’m really here. Okay, sorry! Focus: so many people to thank...

- - - - -

* Yes, I know some fantastic writing falls into this award category, simmer down. And because I’m a sucker for some facts, a few personal favorite, award-winning (real awards, shower steam nowhere in sight) "stealers" over the years: Philip G. Epstein, Julius J. Epstein, & Howard Koch -- Casablanca (1943). Joseph Mankiewicz -- All About Eve (1950). William Godman -- All the Presidents Men (1978). Eric Roth -- Forrest Gump (1994). Aaron Sorkin -- The Social Network (2010)