Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  This is, of course, the story I remember my mother telling: she and Dad passing that terrible head-on collision, Mother covering her eyes so that what was in her womb wouldn’t “see,” wouldn’t be affected by the tangled metal and the bodies and the blood.

  I swooped over to the car and wedged my way into my mother’s belly.

  “And the spirit, the thetan that is Tracy,” I sobbed, “the spirit that is my sister Tracy was already curled up in there.”

  Paloma’s eyes flicked to the meter and back to me.

  “And I nudged her out! I told her, ‘It’s your turn next time.’ And she went! Just like that, she went.”

  I wept and wept. Largely because of how absurd, how impossible it was. Also a vast sorrow that I’d managed to make my way back to Dianetics this lifetime, only to find that Hubbard’s early ideas had developed into the reviled cult known as Scientology. Above all, I wept for what I’d done to Tracy. Was my action of bumping her out of our mother’s womb the reason she’d never felt part of the family, something she’d several times told me? And which had led, at least in part, to her pulling away? Was this the reason that I continually felt so guilty? Talk about an overt! The thetan known as Tracy had always been one of my closest friends and staunchest supporters.

  “And it’s just like her,” I cried, “to just go like that. No fuss. She just—left.”

  Paloma and I tracked through the maze of memory surrounding my having gone Clear, then having died and gone exterior, the frantic looking for a place to reenter this world, the anguish attached to kicking my sister out of our mother’s womb (I’m not sure how this happened, I just “moved in”). But what seemed to be the correct indication was that I was Clear. My needle floated. As I left the building, I felt as if I were floating, that the glowing orb that was me in my body also surrounded it, about eighteen feet high: an enormous light-spilling grin. It was something.

  however, a few weeks later, helping a friend record a demo tape, I couldn’t get a series of notes in a harmony right. As I tried again and again, aware that money was flowing down the drain, I felt my mind seizing up, gripped by three equally powerful vises.

  #1: I would ruin the recording session if I didn’t land these notes.

  #2: How could I be Clear if I let this reactive nonsense get in my way?

  #3: Had I wanted so much to be perceived as Clear that I’d concocted the improbable scenario regarding my sister?

  Years before, when I was about seventeen, I’d talked a lot about how much I wanted to be a writer, and one afternoon my father looked up from the book he was reading.

  “Do you want to be a writer, Sands?” he said. “Or do you want to write? There’s a difference.” He skewered me with a look over the top of his glasses and went back to his book. I resolved never to talk about “being” a writer until I had a publication that proved I was one. Maybe it was like that with Clear. Did I want to be Clear? Or did I just want to be known as Clear?

  Could a doubtful Clear even be Clear?

  I thought about calling Tracy and apologizing, but how could I, when the whole thing was so loony? There was no way to check the “accuracy” of this memory, just as I would never ask my father if he remembered a fight with a fellow cowboy around a campfire. I was clutched within a reality that was only mine, and that of fellow Scientologists.

  And the act was so horrid. If I had concocted it—stitched it together out of a story told by my mother, influenced by that twelve-year-old in AO’s course room and a sense that I “should” be up the Bridge—why would I come up with something so dreadful? Why something so complicated, so mean, that engendered so much guilt?

  Maybe so I could feel I deserved their anger? The ultimate overt?

  To explain why I joined Scientology in the first place?

  To satisfy those expectations?

  Look! I’m Clear! I’m special! I’m extraordinary!

  one sunday afternoon a few weeks later, Dad called. The previous summer, doing research for a novel, he’d taken a trip down the Grand Canyon, and he was planning to do it again. As he described aspects of that first trip—the rafts, the food, his fellow travelers—I couldn’t figure out why he’d called, why he was telling me this, what dreadful thing he might be leading up to. He spoke of a dawn in the Canyon, the sun’s rays sliding down the high walls to gild the river, the sight of it like the sound of an organ with all its stops pulled out. Holding the phone with both hands, I waited for the bomb of what he’d called to tell me.

  “. . . which is all to say, Sands.” He cleared his throat. “It’s all to say that that spiritual stuff does matter. I can see that it does.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Any news from Stanford or Iowa? No. It’s too early. But any day now, I imagine. We look forward to hearing that news. Here’s your mother.”

  Wait, I wanted to say. Come back. Say that again.

  That spiritual stuff does matter. What had he meant? Why had he said it?

  But the moment was gone.

  I wonder what it was like for Dad that Sunday morning, before he lifted the receiver and punched in my number. I’d long wondered if we shared a spiritual tendency: his affection for Handel’s Messiah, our mantras from the Maharishi, the fact that, so long ago, he’d taken his family to that Mexico City cathedral at all, even though he’d hauled me from up from kneeling on its floor. It’s taken years to perceive that his acknowledgment of my quest, communicated in that precious phone call—his completely unexpected approval of having a spiritual path—helped me leave behind the form in which I was seeking it.

  late march 1989, I pushed open our front door over the usual assortment dropped through the mail slot: circulars, flyers, menus, and the endless parade of Scientology promo that used up a million trees a year (critical thought) because stats always had to be improved, and stats were improved by outflow, outflow, outflow. From Skye’s study came the steady sound of typewriter keys. On the floor, shining in sun that beamed through the living room windows, lay a long white envelope. I dumped my purse and bags on the couch and picked it up, taking in the return address.

  The Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  Slim, the envelope. Holding a single sheet of paper.

  A rejection, then. I tore open the flap.

  It was a letter from Frank Conroy, Director, pleased to offer me a place in the Workshop. Apologies that he couldn’t, however, provide a scholarship.

  I had been accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop!

  In my head I was screaming—not entirely from joy. But I didn’t make a sound. I sank onto the couch, aware of blood looping, looping, looping through my veins. Holding the envelope in one hand, the letter in the other, I stared at the opposite wall.

  I could leave, I could leave, I could leave.

  Something about the silence alerted Skye. The threshing stopped. He emerged from his study. “You okay, babe?”

  I handed him the letter.

  He scanned it, lifted his eyes to mine. He tried very hard to look delighted.

  that summer i took another pilgrimage, as I’d come to call them, to the Southwest, delving into the idea that some of the Anasazi had terrorized others, but mostly giving myself the gift of research, coupled with travel, that I loved so much. I spoke with medicine men and, carrying a carton of Marlboros, found my way through the deserts of New Mexico to the hogan of a woman named Annie, with whom I spoke for hours. I’m not sure what I was seeking, but in those wonderful weeks, I found some form of it.

  And then it was time to head to Iowa. When someone intends to be off course or away from an Org for any length of time, Scientology has an extensive process one follows to ensure that you’re not blowing. It’s called “routing out,” and I did every step of it, faithfully. I didn’t want a withhold to sully the waters of my going. When thoughts flickered that once I was in Iowa I might be able to stop being a
Scientologist, I banished them. They never read on an e-meter. My needle floated.

  Part of routing out of my Los Angeles life was helping Skye with the final draft of his novel. Here, too, I wanted to leave everything squeaky clean, convincing others as I convinced myself that there was absolutely no reason I’d not be back. I deeply wanted to balance the exchange I felt I owed him before I left—whatever that leaving might be.

  Finally, car packed, I headed to the Squaw Conference and sat in a haze of delight among a community of writers I felt I had finally joined. I listened to lectures and scribbled notes and at the end of the week set out across the deserts of Nevada and Utah, over the Rockies, veering north on 80 to Nebraska, crossing that endless state where NPR and even music were hard to find on the radio. I grew so bored that I listened for an hour to a litany of the price of hogs and corn. For the first time in my life beyond Hamlet I heard the word “glean”: “Farmer Haverford has finished harvesting,” said the radio announcer. “Those in need are invited at dusk to glean his fields.”

  Glean! The word was familiar to me only as one that Gertrude uses in a request to Hamlet’s schoolmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: to “glean what afflicts” her melancholy son. I pulled over and fetched the dictionary out of its box in the backseat.

  glean: 1) To gather grain left behind by reapers.

  2) To collect bit by bit.

  From Late Latin glennare, prob. of Celt. orig.

  I placed the American Heritage on the seat beside me and pulled back onto the freeway. Without Scientology I might not—no, I would not—have packed a dictionary in my luggage. Nor would I be pondering the fascinating geographical paths a Celtic word might have taken to be adopted into Late Latin. I certainly would not have stopped my car in order to look up a word. Nor would I love the act quite so much.

  That much at least I could keep, surely, even if I managed to jettison the rest?

  But I pushed the thought away. I was Clear! I was a Scientologist!

  modernism?

  In the groups of young, articulate students sitting around long tables in the University of Iowa’s English Philosophy Building (where in those days the Workshop was held), even when we headed to the Mill for the after-workshop beer, I felt like an oddity. Not only did I fear my peers’ reaction should they find out I was (had been? It was still a question) a Scientologist; I was also working as a waitress. Nights when my peers might be at the Foxhead sipping beers, I was at Café Pacifico, serving them. Above all, I was a good fifteen years older than most in the Workshop. I didn’t feel older. But I envied, viscerally, that most of them had spent the previous four years of their lives studying writing. Scientology may have kept me “on course,” but I hadn’t been examining literature or artistic movements, nor any ideas other than those put forth by Hubbard. Sixteen years before, I’d earned a BA in acting. The subsequent two years at ACT had given me cherished training in voice, scansion, movement, historical acting styles, but had done little to augment understanding of the literary kind. Conversations at the Workshop tables leapt and smoked about me. At one point I wrote in my journal, “Modernism?”

  By the age of thirty-seven, I’d filled more journals than I was years old, listened to dozens of lectures on writing, thrashed my way through parts of two novels and a number of stories, but had never studied creative writing. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  And my peers let me know that. Sometimes they were kind. Sometimes they were not. Often it was excruciating. But I was a sponge, taking copious notes. For the first time I had a glimmer of how purposeful one needs to be. With every sentence. Every word.

  It meant a lot when, in response to a second story, my first-semester workshop leader James Salter said, “This is a huge improvement.” I knew it.

  In calls and letters to Skye and Roo and Sunny, I appeared to be a Scientologist, but in mid-October I wrote to Skye, “I’m aghast at the closet I shut myself in for seven years . . .” I didn’t mail that letter. I was still sorting, sorting—I found I used Scientology principles all the time—but I was obsessed by what I had missed. This, this was life! That I was on a campus, a beautiful one, with a river that looped its shining way between ivy-covered brick buildings, only emphasized all I’d rejected. For years. The reason I’d been unable to commit to the Church was now so obvious. And how often Skye had tried to make me see that!

  Late that fall, following another agonized phone call, he tried again, in a letter.

  I get that there are many things that matter to you, but their assigned values are at odds with mine, and equal, sometimes opposite from each other . . . Keeping your parents happy is of the same value as keeping Skye happy. Having an academic, intellectually stimulating life is as important as Scientology. What is VITAL. Then what is important. Then what is nice. These delineations that can’t be imposed by others or by “shoulds” . . .

  I was dismissive. Of course having an intellectually stimulating life is as important as Scientology! It’s more important!

  It took years to understand the wisdom of what Skye was asking me to examine.

  Also, there it was again: Skye wanted my survival, far beyond this single life, far beyond simply our love for each other. And so I persuaded myself that no other man would ever care so much. There’d be no other with whom I’d laugh so hard, with whom I’d share such friends, with whom I’d make such love. Having allowed him—forced him—to become everything to me, and even knowing that sooner or later we’d have to part, I could not bring myself to sever that spiritual umbilical cord.

  second semester, still paying very high out-of-state tuition, I approached the secretary of the English department to inquire about the university’s creative writing correspondence course, currently taught by someone who’d graduated the Workshop years before.

  “You have parents who can pay your tuition,” she said. “And I’m sure they’d be happy to.”

  “I’m not going to ask my parents for money!” I did not add that they would not, in fact, be “happy to.” As far as they knew, I was still a Scientologist.

  “Nevertheless, they can afford it. Just ask them.”

  I shook my head. I kept waitressing and took out another student loan.

  The ethos of the Workshop under its director at the time, Frank Conroy, reminded me of some of Degas’s ballet paintings: a régisseur, in charge of keeping a choreography intact, stands with what looks like a long whip, ready to slash at the calves of ballerinas who execute their movements less than exquisitely. This patriarchal idea, that only through pain can lessons be properly delivered, permeated the talk around those tables.

  Nevertheless, I felt the only way to become a better writer was to place myself, that second semester, under Frank’s famously caustic tutelage. And he was as tough as his reputation. Among other things, he didn’t appear to care what his students might have to say. He didn’t seem to subscribe to the idea that it’s in articulating an opinion about a piece of writing that a writer learns what’s ineffective in her own work. He’d let about three of them (I can hardly say us, as I felt so alien to that group) say what they thought about a given manuscript before launching into his own perspective—sometimes positive, usually a screed.

  Frank actually liked my first manuscript, an excerpt from the novel. But he flayed the second one. His lecture regarding all that was wrong with it went on and on and on and on. Afterward, instead of heading to the Mill for an after-workshop beer with those I could no longer even pretend were my peers, I found myself in a stall in the ladies room in the basement of the Iowa City Mall. I was not a writer. Frank had pointed that out. The Workshop had only admitted me at all because they figured my father—the real writer—would cough up the needed dough. I had no need to stand on my own two feet; my parents could do it all for me. Why had I ever thought there was any point in trying to make my own way? If I’d just led their life, the life they’d told me to lead, al
l would be well.

  Just the previous summer my mother had told me: “If I had your talent and beauty and resources, I’d have made such a life for myself. You’ve squandered all of it.”

  Sitting in that stall, at such a low point, in such a low, dank place, I shivered violently. I had to leave. But where? Not LA. Nor Squaw. There was no “home” to go to. I didn’t want to be on the planet at all. There was no place for me on it.

  I don’t know how friends figured out where to find me, but they did.

  Come to the Mill, they said. I can’t possibly, I said. I can’t sit among real writers when it is so clear I am not one. They took me to a hole-in-the-wall, George’s, where they bought me a beer and a hamburger, blood sugar I sorely needed. They made me laugh at the critique Frank had given, at the froth that sometimes showed up in the corners of his mouth when he spewed his perspectives; we talked books and authors until I could stand up from that table knowing I could get up the next morning, that I was a writer, that I would keep on writing.

  Spring break, still smarting from that workshop, I headed to the Southwest, wondering if the Hopi tribe would take me in. Maybe I’d just veer off the road, disappear into a mesa, crawl into a cliff dwelling, join the Anasazi, wherever they’d wound up. Skye flew to meet me and we stayed for a few days with my brother’s old girlfriend Dana, a fine artist, who lived outside of Durango.