A Field Guide for Heartbreakers

by Kristen Tracy

  I closed my eyes. I hated to think too much about the wounded owl incident. But when that particular memory surfaced, I couldn’t drive it out of my mind. I had to replay it over and over as a way to exorcise the trauma.

  Hamilton and I had found the bird together. It was staggering through a crosswalk.

  “Bubo virginianus!” Hamilton shouted. “A great horned owl!”

  Hamilton parked his Volvo on the side of the road and we both sprang out of the car.

  “There’s a towel in my gym bag!” he yelled.

  I ran back to the car for it. When I reached the owl it looked like a scientific experiment gone wrong. Its body was mangled. Burned.

  “It needs a vet,” he said.

  He wrapped the owl like a baby. Its yellow eyes studied me, and its black beak curved into its white chin feathers like a dangerous hook. I held it while Hamilton drove. The owl grew hot on my lap. I kept looking into its eyes. They were so intelligent. And so scared. I kept saying, “You’re going to be fine.”

  Hamilton sped into a vet’s parking lot, grabbed the owl, and left me in the car. I didn’t move. My heartbeat quickened. I thought of the bird and how it must have felt. The towel pinning its wings to its body. An unfamiliar pain pulsing through it. Would it ever be able to fly again? Would it want to? Would it develop an unbreakable fear of guns? Or the sound of guns? How would it handle thunderstorms? Would it be able to find a mate? I felt twisted. Like a rag. My emotions were being wrung out of me. I didn’t like thinking this hard.

  I sat and waited for Hamilton to come back. In retrospect, I realize that I could have gone into the vet’s office, but at the time this didn’t even occur to me. I’d sat and focused on the outcome that I wanted. The bird was going to survive. We’d found it. And saved it. It was going to pull through. But was this enough? I dreaded the idea that the owl would be altered. Would it still be able to hunt? Would it have to live in a caged-in area? Ugh. Probably. It was never going to be whole again. I leaned my head against the window and cried. And I didn’t try to stop crying. I fogged up every window in Hamilton’s car. When he came back, he didn’t ask me what was wrong; he assumed that he knew.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s terrible to see that kind of suffering. But it’s going to be okay. They’ll send it to a sanctuary. The people there know how to handle this exact sort of owl injury.”

  A sanctuary.

  Hamilton rubbed my knee and smiled. Maybe this was the best thing for the owl. Maybe it didn’t even know the difference between captivity and freedom. Maybe it would never know it was damaged.

  “You still look sad,” he said. “Why?”

  I shrugged.

  “Once it’s better, we’ll go and visit it,” he said. “I promise.”

  The owl died that night.

  When Hamilton called to tell me, he almost cried. After I hung up with him I called Veronica and told her about the unfortunate incident. But I didn’t go into too many details. I emphasized the incredible adventure. And the intensity of trying to save a wounded animal. And the closeness I’d felt with Hamilton during and after the whole ordeal.

  “Wow,” Veronica said. “What kind of coward shoots an owl?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I do. An asshole coward.”

  And at the time I didn’t even realize that I was trying to sanitize the sadness of the situation by leaving out certain parts. But it was a classic example of flaw number one: I had selectively withheld important information for the sake of creating a more pleasant reality. But was it so wrong to reshape a tragic event in order to make it less tragic?

  I must have sat in the hallway for a half hour. When the class broke for a ten-minute break, Veronica hurried out to check on me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m not even sure,” I said.

  “Is it gastrointestinal?” she asked. “I mean, we’re in an Eastern European country, and you’re drinking a ton of tap water.”

  I shook my head no. I saw somebody poke his head out of the room. It was Roger.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I nodded. His head disappeared back into the classroom. Then I heard the clicking sound of heeled shoes. It was Mrs. Knox.

  “You look a little pale,” she said.

  “I feel pale,” I said.

  “We should probably call a taxi, and I should escort her back to the dorms,” Veronica said.

  I shook my head. “I want to go back to class. I don’t want to miss Brenda’s story.”

  “Are you sure?” Veronica asked. “I know how to hail a taxi.”

  “She says she wants to go back to class,” Mrs. Knox said. She held out her hand and helped me up.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I walked back into class feeling thirsty and light-headed. Veronica intuited this, and handed me an apple and some water. She seemed angry, but I knew she’d get over it. She moved Frank’s things and made a place for me to sit. Class was important. We couldn’t blow off the first workshop.

  Brenda wanted to read from the middle of her story.

  “Have you ever heard a lobster scream? They don’t go peacefully into the boiling pot. They want to live as much as anything. I held my lobster in a box and walked past a fisherman in the parking lot. Goshdarn these fishermen and their rubber yellow coats. Goshdarn their toggles and boots. Goshdarn their weathered faces. Goshdarn their smelly pants. Didn’t they know that lobsters mattered? Furious with the world, I drove like a maniac with my lobster to the sea.”

  “Wow,” Veronica said. “Cool scene. But I think you ‘goshdarn’ yourself into a corner.”

  Mrs. Knox gently slapped the table. “We start with what’s working.”

  “I’ll tell you what I like,” Annie Earl said. “I like how she turns the rest of the world into savages. Lobsters die. We know that. But this story made me consider their point of view.”

  “Thanks,” Brenda said. “My boyfriend is a fisherman. And I’m really conflicted about it.”

  “Shh,” Mrs. Knox said. “No talking until after we finish responding to your piece.”

  I glanced at Veronica. She looked as thrilled as I felt. Our only competition for male attention in the workshop had been Brenda. And she’d admitted right in front of all of us that she had a boyfriend, and so now she was out of the game. It was a gift from the heavens.

  “I liked your description of the clambake,” Frank said. “I’ve never been to one. You’re great at capturing smell images.”

  I had never heard of a “smell image.”

  “I really enjoyed this story,” Roger said. “It’s a great premise. The way we cook lobsters is torture, but because they’re lobsters, the narrator’s mission is, in society’s eyes, borderline crazy.”

  Brenda smiled and nodded, like he’d gotten it.

  “That’s so compelling in itself,” Roger continued. “And because her passion felt so sincere, I found the ‘goshdarns’ kind of grating. They felt loaded, like they were somehow criticizing the narrator’s conservative, working-class background. For me, the language of the story began to challenge the narrative.”

  Brenda stopped smiling. Veronica leaned in toward me and whispered, “Meet our workshop’s Derrida.” I didn’t know who or what a Derrida was.

  “I also felt a little clobbered,” Roger continued, “by the appearance of the seafood-loving priest in the second grocery store scene. He seemed a little too convenient. It felt deus ex machina, and it made the lobster feel less central.”

  “Maybe the lobster is Catholic,” Waller joked.

  Roger grimaced at that comment.

  “The message hit me in the face too,” Veronica said.

  “The religious references did feel a bit shoehorned in,” said Corky.

  “I liked the priest,” said Frank. “He was creepy, but so are lobsters and fishermen. Also, so is the chick buying groceries and tossing them into the sea.”

  “How much do lobsters cost?
” Kite said. “I’ve seen them in the grocery stores, but never bought one. The story might be addressing, like, class.”

  “The fisherman did strike me as underpriviliged,” Annie Earl said. “I think the protagonist feels conflicted about this. I think that’s a big part of what’s motivating her.”

  “Yeah,” Roger said. “But gender is important too. All the lobsters’ opposition is male.”

  “Even the bag boy,” Waller added.

  For the next twenty minutes the class discussed the price of live lobsters and then moved on to class warfare. Then we dissected the male characters and their symbolic roles. Everyone commented except for me. I just wasn’t sure what to say. When I reread sections, the fisherman’s untoggled rubber coat took on all kinds of new meaning. Like maybe I was supposed to imagine what was underneath that coat. Maybe the piece was a lot more carnal and sophisticated than I gave it credit for.

  At the end of the criticism, Mrs. Knox gave Brenda the go-ahead to speak.

  “Roger, I appreciated your comments. Mostly,” she said. “I’m sorry you felt clobbered by the priest. I think he’s thematically essential to the story.” She looked at Mrs. Knox. “When I was a sophomore at Bowdoin, I sent an earlier version of this story as part of a collection to an editor at Knopf. It got rejected, but I got a very thoughtful letter. It really all came down to platform and market. She said that she needed a clearer way to position it. It was regional and quiet. She felt it needed more hooks. A quirky underdog. Religion, repression, sex. She said she could already see hints of these things and that I needed to tease them out. I think she was right.”

  Veronica leaned into me again. “Suck-up alert.” I pulled away from her.

  “My classmates at Bowdoin don’t get it. They don’t pay attention to the market. They want to play with their own minds at the expense of everything else. They write experimental, marginal, nonlinear crap because they like it, and frankly, it’s masturbatory. I’m not saying I’m the next Lorrie Moore, but, well, maybe I am saying that.”

  Veronica leaned back into me. “I plan to use the word masturbatory in defense of my piece too.”

  Mrs. Knox nodded with a faintly amused smile. “Was the editor Kathryn Carter?” she asked.

  Brenda nodded, surprised.

  “She and I went to college together. Funny she’d come up. She always did have a thing for hooks.” Mrs. Knox did a subtle imitation of a cat with its claws drawn. A few people laughed, but she talked over them. “Brenda has raised an interesting point. It’s true. Editors, those fickle cultural gatekeepers, are usually the people who decide whether your writing makes it to the marketplace. It’s important to read. And all writers I know follow the industry somewhat.”

  Brenda smiled like she was the true genius among a flock of floundering nongeniuses.

  “Brenda, I admire your ambition. But I would never encourage a young writer to tailor her vision for an editor or add ‘hooks’ that feel inorganic to a story. I thought the voice would have been more compelling with fewer quirks.” She smiled kindly. “Compromising sincerity is the worst injustice a talented writer can do herself.”

  Veronica made a gag face, which her mother thankfully didn’t notice.

  “I came to Prague to teach you the craft of writing—character development, inventiveness with language, paring away excess, and homing in on truth. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with holding a magnifying glass over the raw, daily patterns of human life. If you know and love the human heart, you can write a heartbreaking best-seller about canning beets.”

  For the rest of the workshop, Mrs. Knox said amazing, insightful things about books she loved, and chatted with my classmates about their favorite and least favorite protagonists. I thought she was brilliant. Everything she said was worth writing down, so I had to start using shorthand. Veronica, though, acted like she’d heard it all before.

  Mrs. Knox ended the class by giving us an assignment. “Visit one of Prague’s historical synagogues and write ten descriptive sentences about it. Remember, focus on creating vivid images. The nature of image is about perception. Don’t be afraid to use all five senses.”

  After class I handed back the stories to Kite and Brenda. I didn’t want to, but I felt obligated. I thought Veronica would pump the guys for information about where they were headed, but instead, she hooked her arm in mine and rushed me toward the stairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Veronica veered left, past the front doors.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I think I saw a computer lab. I want to see if Boz wrote back.” She grinned wickedly and walked toward a side door. “It’ll only take a minute,” she said, holding the door for me.

  I followed her out into the warm afternoon. Maybe I should e-mail Hamilton and admit to him that I was beginning to understand the nature of my flaws. Maybe something like this would make a difference. I mean, it seemed possible that proper introspection could rekindle a broken bond.

  “Oh my god!” Veronica said. “Look at that guy’s ass. It’s the most bulbous thing I’ve ever seen.”

  I didn’t look. “Bulbous good or bulbous bad?” I asked.

  “Bulbous fantastic,” Veronica said.

  I looked. “Isn’t that his wallet?”

  “Maybe. Let’s go introduce ourselves. Do you know how to ask What time is it? in Czech?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter. Men love foreign girls in distress. Follow my lead.”

  I watched Veronica jog ahead. When the guy with the bulbous butt turned around, I noticed two things. First, he had a bushy red beard. Second, he had a baby strapped to his chest. Veronica must have noticed these things too, because when she reached him, she jogged right on past. Then she ducked into the computer lab. I was relieved.

  I took the bearded baby-guy as a premonition. From behind, he looked interesting. But full frontal was a different story. Therein lay the message: we shouldn’t introduce ourselves to strange men. Because strange men might appear one way, but be a totally different way in reality. I mean, Veronica seemed to be forgetting that we were teenagers. Who had no business chasing after random Czech men we met on the street. I walked into the lab and scouted for Veronica’s familiar head. She was beaming as she waved me over.

  “He wrote me back!” she said. “Oh my god! You’ll never guess what Boz said. My plan is totally working. It’s like taking candy from a tween.”

  “You mean baby,” I said.

  “Tweens are babies,” Veronica said, happily pecking the keyboard. “Haven’t you ever noticed the way they dress?”

  Chapter Nine

  “Is somebody at our door?” I asked.

  What began as polite light thudding had grown into distinct pounding.

  “Sounds like a psychopath,” Veronica said. “I’m not answering it.”

  “Veronica! It’s your mother! Are you there?”

  I got out of bed and answered the door. A very bedraggled-looking Mrs. Knox entered our suite and walked into our bedroom.

  “This humidity is wrecking my hair,” she said. “I’m headed out to buy a curling iron. I thought you two might want to come.”

  “That sounds cool,” Veronica said, throwing on some clothes. “I need crap.”

  “Me too.” I quickly slipped on my shorts and sneakers and followed the Knoxes out the door.

  “Last time I was here my hair behaved wonderfully, the way it does in Moscow and Berlin,” Mrs. Knox said as we exited the building. “But this time, atmospherically, Prague is behaving like a totally different beast. I feel like a puff ball.”

  “I think you look good,” I told her.

  “Ha,” Veronica said, skipping ahead of us down the sidewalk.

  “Oh, but have I ever told you how much I covet your hair?” Mrs. Knox asked me.

  I was shocked to hear that anyone would covet my hair, let alone somebody blessed with thick, flowing masses of it.

  “It falls around your face in
a way that seems happy.”

  I reached up and pushed some of it behind my ear. Veronica was at least two car lengths ahead of us as she descended into the metro station.

  “She has two speeds,” Mrs. Knox said. “Stop, and go-like-hell.”

  This made me laugh. Because it was totally accurate. When we caught up with Veronica, she was studying a map of the metro and tapping her foot like an over- caffeinated rabbit.

  “Will the store have thermometers?” she asked.

  “Are you already anticipating a fever?” Mrs. Knox countered.

  “I might have brought a thermometer,” I said.

  Both Veronica and her mother looked at me in total surprise.

  “My mom had me pack a small first-aid kit,” I said. “I think it has one.”

  When the train arrived, Veronica found a seat right away and plunked herself down in it. Mrs. Knox sat across the aisle and invited me to take the seat next to her. The ride was short, and Mrs. Knox was too preoccupied with her hair to chat. She touched it over and over. It wasn’t until the end of the ride that she refocused her attention on me.

  “Are you feeling better since yesterday?” she asked.

  I didn’t like thinking about my meltdown in class. And I didn’t want to confess that it stemmed from feeling wholly inadequate as a commenter.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Travel can be disorienting. There’s no shame in taking naps.”

  “Okay,” I said. But in reality I couldn’t imagine informing Veronica that instead of going off and tracking down hot-dudes with her, I was opting to power nap in the dorm.

  “Also I want you to know that you shouldn’t feel any pressure to say things in class,” Mrs. Knox said. “But you shouldn’t feel intimidated either. The first time is the hardest, but after that it gets easier.”