About a week later, my friend who got boobs way sooner than I knew what they were, said, “I heard Michael was upset about the letter you sent to Adam.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because he likes you, duh.”
“Oh no! I got them mixed up.”
Over ten years later as a college sophomore at the University of Boulder, Maureen and I learned the first rule of journalism: fact check. Facts, though, bored me. Made-up stories, where my imagination could choose, intrigued me much more. My choosy imagination is why, when our communications professor Bert-Some-thing-or-Other (friends with Walter Cronkite and an old-timer-CBS-correspondent who always wore a tie and told exhausting stories from the war zone) gave our class a journalism assignment to interview two people on campus, I cozied up under a shade tree and invented characters and dialogue. I don’t remember what I wrote, only that a week later, Professor Bert used my story as a prize example of a job well done. From then on, I was hooked on fiction to escape the hard work of the front lines and still make the top grades. I turned all my classes into covert adventures in creativity. Maureen, on the other hand, covered actual events, quoted real people, and double-checked her work.
I wish Maureen had shown up in our sixth-grade class at Our Savior Lutheran. She would have said, “Are you sure it’s Adam you like? Let’s think about this first and make sure you got the right name.” Yes, she would have asked those questions exactly like that: clear, but giving me the opportunity to discover the answers for myself, so I could feel a bit empowered, not like such a heel. She could have set me straight about my first marriage, too.
All the remembering made me curious about what else I was getting mixed up. What else did I think of as the truth, but really had all wrong? What truths could be rewritten, retold, imagined, cooked-up?
Chapter 14
Ten
On the morning of Jack’s tenth birthday, I prepped for his party and the neighbor kid, Sam, pulled up on his bike to take the birthday boy for a ride.
“Come on back in about thirty minutes,” I said, without looking up, running a vacuum back and forth over the kitchen floor.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam replied as his Southern manners dictated.
Jack walked out of the room without turning around, too excited to engage with formalities. His party would start soon; it was his day.
On the way out, I heard him ask his friend, “Why do you think people say ‘eeeww’ when they see people kissing in the movies. I don’t get it. And then they don’t say ‘eeeww’ when they see someone kissing a dog.”
The door slammed behind them, and I continued cleaning. From cobwebbed corners of memory, I revisited my son’s birth. At one-thirty-ish on a cold afternoon in March, nurses in blue shuffled around doing I-have-no-idea-what and became white noise. My midwife asked if I wanted an incision to help him come out.
“No.” I really didn’t. “Let’s keep pushing.”
Daddy Tom barely looked up. He stood to the side, half filming the birth, half watching hockey on the TV, unavailable for comment.
“Give me your hand,” said the midwife. She guided my sweaty fingers down to the opening where a little human being emerged. “Can you feel him?”
Oh my god, I could! I caressed the top of his head, malleable, soft, fuzzy, wet, a ripe peach; I couldn’t believe I actually felt his head coming out of my root chakra. Tom would alternate between holding my hand, filming Jack’s head, and tracking the Red Wings score.
My pushing was rewarded. I earned an A+, the most important one. Eight minutes later, he’d fully arrived through no incision, into the dry, physical world, extending head to toe the length of one of my writing notebooks. His nose came out crooked and bloody from the journey down the birth canal. Dad paid attention at that point, documenting embryonic fluids. I lay still in bed, amazed, glad for the team that had guided me step-by-step on how to push and breathe and deliver a human being. Doctors and nurses disposed of the embryonic sac and wiped up goo while I lay, drugged, detached, disconnected from my birthing power as a woman, yet thanking God that I didn’t have to give birth naturally: squatting and hallucinating from pain.
Oohing and ahhing, the nurses took our baby to a table in the side room and lay him on his back. Jack screamed in staccatos (perhaps foreshadowing a future in the marching band?) and peed in a straight shot to the ceiling. Tom caught that on film, too.
It didn’t take long for the novelty of a newborn to wear off and Tom to invoke his “pass” card. After only a few weeks, he declined to take part in nighttime feedings, demanded he have time to himself, and played a daily rerun of “I’ve worked all day, I need to rest, I shouldn’t have to deal with the baby when I get home.” He left Jack either predominantly in my care, in front of the TV, or pawned off into the arms of loving grandparents.
As I prepped for Jack’s tenth birthday party and reminisced, in chronological order, from the first months into the first few years of Jack’s life, I felt the flinching in my belly of what had come next—hands around my throat, fists punching holes in drywall, and the constant threat to take my son away if I didn’t do what Tom wanted. Like each time before, I forced those memories into mental filing cabinets I didn’t open.
Instead, I focused on the surprised rapidness of ten years gone by. Just like that.
I had scheduled an appointment to have the IUD removed, but made no plans to get another one just yet. I waffled between wanting another child and freedom; no way did I want to wait another two continuous decades of putting their needs in front of my own while I, energy-less, skipped out on adult socials, African safaris, and long, luxurious stretches with my head in a story, typing slower than the ideas came.
The comparison of life with a baby versus life without occupied me as I finished vacuuming the rest of the house and moved to sweeping the front porch. I enjoyed being on the stoop, in daylight, present to green philodendrons perking up from the previous night’s spring rain and the decadent warmth of my body like a marshmallow in the sun. I brushed away dead lizard tails, compared the pros and cons of life with and without a baby, then swept grits of sand, then compared, swept, compared, swept, compared, then heard Jack and Sam laughing and shouting from bike to bike as they road up the street.
I admired my son: a big boy now, nose straightened out, the brown hair on his head smooth and dry like rayon. Sam called out, “See you later” as he whizzed home. Jack bumped his front tire over the sidewalk and rode straight into the grass, jumping off in one continuous motion, so even the bike stood upright for a moment before it realized its rider was done. As the bike plopped to the grass, stiff on its side, Jack ran up to me.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” he said.
“Yeah, it doesn’t have to be perfect,” repeated the distant voice of the echo muse.
Addicted to “just one more edit,” I pushed the remaining leaves off the porch with another few sweeps.
Jack grabbed the broom from my hand. “Mom, enough working. There’s fun to be had.”
Chapter 15
Rain
Indeed, after Jack had his fun, I went to the laptop for mine.
I remember rain I typed into the blog post. It fell on my head and made my hair stick to my eyes and neck. I didn’t care. I held his hand. We quick-walked, slopping in our shoes through the streets of New Orleans. The downpour dulled the colors of the city, but I couldn’t see any way behind the glaze of desire. I was wet, inside and out. Only five more blocks to go before my saturated body would be rumbling as violently as the thunder, pouring out all the condensation that had built up for the last thirty years.
A short, crisp ditty. I hit “publish” on Wordpress.
Rain, I scribbled the word on a blank sheet of paper, in elegant cursive, letting my hand feel the looping of the letter “r” and ending with the tail of the “n.”
Rain. The writer’s metronome.
I traced over the letters again and again.
I was filled up.
I pliéd myself to the kitchen to refill a cup of tea.
“Gabe?” I swiped a kiss across the back of his blond head as he pulled carrots, an onion, and chicken from the fridge to cook a post-birthday party dinner.
“Yes, darling?”
“I do not want any more children. If I tell you otherwise, don’t believe me.”
Chapter 16
Six Rocks
Six rocks sat on my writing desk: two came from my grandmother’s beach in Florida, two from mountain hikes in Colorado, and two from Gomera in the Canary Islands, my first exotic getaway with Gabe. The smallest rock was pebble-like, about the circumference of a quarter, and white with a wispy, but clearly defined, black circle that wrapped around the stone like a wedding band. Another was perfectly round, perfectly smooth, perfect except for the coffee-stained birthmark that covered a curved edge. In contrast was a chip from the Colorado Rockies, jagged with green splotches that could be mistaken for what I imagine might be Leprechaun vomit. Another rock reminded me of Saturn with layers of thin rings in varying shades of sand.
Originally, I’d placed them on my desk, close by, so I could touch them when I felt scared or blank or the need for connection to powerful moments. Connection would help, I thought. Connection to the earth. Connection to my center, wherever that is. But I never touched the stones once, except to reposition them after Jack’s backpack had landed on my desk, knocking them out of place.
To the left of the rocks, and a little further toward the top corner of the desk, rested a vase: a yellow, curvy structure with a base expanding outwards in the width and shape of an oversized, luxurious tea cup, then coming back together at the top in a pinch of round opening, trimmed with a thick circular strip of red. I liked the opening outlined in red, a squirt of blood against a belly pregnant with sunshine.
As I wrote, the vase held water and the sprig of a viburnum branch leaning to the side. The glossy, forest green leaves suggested a postcard of a palm leaf in the rain. Tropical. Alive. Reminding me to find the keys and get on out the door: there’s a whole world to see.
Which got me thinking. . . .
Where in the world did the girl live? I wondered. The girl I’d seen in my vision, the fictional character whose story was taking shape in my imagination. I felt her presence with me constantly, as if she were real, riding in the backseat with Jack as I dropped him off to school or hovering over me while Gabe and I made love. She consumed my thoughts as I mapped out the pieces of her life, getting bits and insights from things I’d see around town or conversations in passing, like the one I had with my friend who described an out-of-body experience she’d had one night as a child in which she had hovered over her bed.
I’m often surprised by what it takes for people to survive, children even more. And yet they do. I wanted to understand why a father might abuse his daughter sexually, why a mother would not say anything about it, why a daughter would still love her abuser, and how that little girl could go on in the face of such trauma. How could I create characters that the reader would connect with despite their flaws? How could I tell a story combining abuse and love in the same breath?
While I sought answers, the character, abused and resilient and fearing death as she tracked the words she spoke, bravely charged ahead in my mind. She was a trickster, that one, and she cursed like a motherfucker, to herself, of course, because she couldn’t say “fuck,” “asshole,” or “shit” out loud. Not yet, anyway. At night, she would leave her body, hover above her bed as if in a dream, and imagine a padlocked door below to protect her sleeping physical form.
The ideas trickled in, beginning to make a whole. I felt the pull in my belly, wanting to put her story to paper, wanting to find her words.
Do you think I could birth a novel out of this vase? I reflected, wondering if that rogue muse was in the vicinity. I waited for an answer, admiring the long, lanky candle burning to my right. The thinnest line of wax dripped down the side, forming little humps, a miniature dragon’s tail.
What if I could birth a novel?
Six rocks sat firm, unwavering in their commitment to ground me, word by word, no matter how off-centered I felt, and a cunning muse echoed, “What if? What if? What if?”
Chapter 17
Mad
The moment a teaspoon of possibility arrives, resistance enters like an FBI house raid. I’m not sure why resistance likes to create a disturbance capable of forcing one into prescription drugs. Maybe to create drama? A plot point? To make artists prove they want it, can do it? Or just to mess around like a monkey muse? Whatever the reasons, resistance never ends. I’m still learning how to ignore its many disguises including (but definitely not limited to) an unmade bed, moving house, to-do lists, grocery shopping, a napping-couch, a headache, yeahbuts, adopting a new puppy, and hurt feelings, like on the day I found out Maureen was pregnant.
“Oh! My! God!” I hadn’t realized I’d yelled it until I heard Gabe calling from the other room, “What’s the matter, sweetie?”
I slammed up from my chair, yanked the cord out of the laptop and carried it, an open book.
“Here,” I said, shoving my entire computer into Gabe’s lap before he could open up a New York Times. “Read it.” My pointy finger stuck straight out, tapping hard as if I could hammer the email through the screen and force the message back to sender.
He looked down, scanning his eyes over the letter.
“Out loud, please.” My tone was not polite.
Gabe read: “Hi Elizabeth, are you coming to Denver for Maureen’s baby shower? I’m trying to get a head count. Also, if you have any ideas on games we could play, I’d love to hear them. Maybe even a song or a dance? Love, Sara Jane.”
Gabe looked up. “Who’s Sara Jane?”
Eyes rolled, I put my hands on my hips. “Sister-inlaw. That is not the point!”
“I didn’t know Maureen was having a baby.”
“Exactly.” I yanked the computer from his lap and stomped back to my desk.
I sat on the edge of my seat, fingers curved, writhing over the keyboard but not touching a single key. I wiggled my fingers fast. I couldn’t wait to pounce on the keys, pushing into them hard, with all my fury. Only, I didn’t know what words to write. Emotions swirled: anger, confusion, fear. Had she secretly downgraded our friendship status without telling me?
A baby shower!?
Confusion provoked anxiety which provoked questions I couldn’t answer, questions that made no sense. If she didn’t tell me, then maybe she didn’t even really want me to attend her baby shower? Wasn’t it only a week ago we last spoke? Maybe two weeks? It seemed so recent, but maybe I hadn’t called in a while; I didn’t recall the time passing. Maureen didn’t like when we’d go long stretches without talking. Regardless, that’s no reason to send a best friend to the weed eater. Maureen must have a good reason for not telling me this, she must. How could my best friend not tell me she was p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t?
I felt mad. Left out. Hurt. Mad. Real mad. Shock settled in like an ice cube in bourbon. So I typed:
Hey, way to tell your best friend you’re pregnant. Did you put me back in the doghouse?
Too pissy, I decided.
How about, Wow, you’re pregnant. Should I pretend I still don’t know?
Which brought up a good point. Should I?
Maybe Maureen was waiting to tell me in person. Maybe Sara Jane was just a type A baby shower planner and had sent out invites before Maureen could spread the good news. I mean, maybe Maureen had been trying to call me all day, and I just hadn’t answered my phone because I’d been off working and daydreaming about how I could come up with the money to buy a new Mac-Book Pro. Yes, that was it.
I checked the cell, but none of the day’s calls were from Maureen. I even scrolled through the call history for the last week. Somewhere there must have been a missed call? A rogue voice mail? A carrier pigeon? But no.
We were going to be pregnant together, opening packages with hand-woven
blankets and booties while eating Jell-O, I thought.
I didn’t eat Jell-O, of course. I didn’t even buy Jell-O. When I was eight, still losing baby teeth and convinced I would do grown-up way better than Mom and Dad, I figured Jell-O would be on every grocery list. As an adult, fabulous or not, my pantry contained brown rice, lentils, quinoa. I even bought organic dog biscuits. I barely remembered what I’d liked about Jell-O, a goofy food. With a mind of its own, Jell-O didn’t stay put. Jell-O seemed to laugh a lot, usually at the human about to eat it. Then again, Jell-O could be still and quiet. Observing, placid. Drenched in red. Or green. Or pink. Jell-O picked a side and stuck with it. No changing colors mid-term. It was what it was. Mostly, Jell-O didn’t seem to have a problem being Jell-O. I’d rather like to be Jell-O. I thought if I were more like Jell-O, maybe Maureen would love me again.
I kicked up out of my chair for the third time, knocking it backward.
“Gabriel?!” I barreled through, a warning horn on a train. “Maureen is pregnant.”
The Times, unfolded in his hands, stood as a wall between him and me, a metaphor for the barriers seemingly constructed since I had started asking about babies and marriage.
“Yes, I know. That’s really great,” he said from behind his great wall, The Great Wall of New York Gabriel Times.
“She didn’t tell me.” I practically bit at him through the paper. I would make him remove that divide between us, even if I had to sneak that paper into the food processor and mince it into a frothy broth.
He breathed in, then folded the Times along its appropriate seams, gently laying it on the floor.
“Come here,” he said, tender, patting his chest, encouraging me to crawl inside his arms and nuzzle up to his heart, safe and warm, cradled like an embryo. He offered me love to feed on until I was ready to go back into the big, cold, Maureen-message-less world. Once I knew he was willing to console me as I broke down over Maureen’s big news, I found the strength to fight.
The Elegant Out Page 6