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A Fridge Photo and a Texas Tradition

October 24, 2023
blueberry

As blueberry season ends, here’s what I’ve learned about legacy, tradition, and fake-family. 

I took a video of my daughter yesterday. In it, she’s crouched under the branches of a blueberry bush. July marks the end of blueberry season in Texas, and my daughter is taking full advantage. Her plump face hovers over a bushel basket and she’s popping fresh berries into her mouth, one after the other, with the fervor of a ravenous woodland creature. But that’s what two-year-old’s do; they find something they love and indulge with abandon. Plus, they like snacks.

The record-breaking East Texas heat seeps through the lens and I’m sweating again just watching her. Behind my daughter, her fake-cousins each swing their own basket and root through the bushes in the shadow of their mom, Courtney. Out of frame, their baby sister rides on dad’s shoulders. She bounces, her head bobbing up and down as the two walk the well-worn rows of Blueberry Hill Farm.

I’m hot and miserable, but Courtney’s kids keep picking blueberries (and my kid keeps eating them). It’s tradition. I’m not a kid anymore, so after capturing the memory on camera, I retreat to the corrugated tin shop at the edge of the farm where they sell blueberry lemonade, blueberry donuts, blueberry ice cream, and queso fresco (sans blueberries). This is Texas, after all. The proprietor tells me the just-baked blueberry-zucchini bread is her favorite. I buy a loaf for the drive back to Dallas. Like my daughter, I like a good snack.

Back at the house, Country’s parents have a photo on their fridge—one that’s been there for 25 years. I’ve never paid it much attention, but like the quirks of a roommate or spouse, I’ve grown to know it without even trying. It’s a photo of us—me and my siblings, Courtney and hers—on a hot summer day under the East Texas sun.

My brother stands on one side of the photo in an oversized, early 90’s t-shirt. I’m next to him, holding onto my little sister. She’s in a blue checkered bucket hat and overalls. Courtney’s oldest brother carries the littlest. His grip is slipping; the pink, plump baby threatens to slide from his brother’s grasp, but the boys are smiling in the oblivious way little boys do. Courtney is last in line and wears a shy smile. She was always the quiet one. We squint in the blazing sunlight, our backs against the unruly bushes of Blueberry Hill Farm. Off-camera, our bushel baskets present a paltry offering of fresh-picked berries.

Courtney’s not the quiet one anymore. As an adult, she can befriend a tree. And more miraculous, she seems to always have the emotional energy for fresh befriending. After my daughter was born, it felt like I only had just enough heart to hold me and mine inside it. Courtney doesn’t feel that way. Three kids later and her heart is still open to all. She’ll overshare with the cashier at the gas station and chat up the vendor at the farmer’s market. She’ll spill her life story to fellow berry-pickers at Blueberry Hill Farm, and she’ll get theirs in return.

Courtney is self-assured. She has a presumptive confidence that says, “Of course you want to hear my story. Why wouldn’t you?” Like my daughter when she shows me the berries she’s picked. “You want to see this, don’t you? Of course, you do.” It’s the faith of a child, an earnest faith in vulnerability, in friendship. She always extends the invitation.

Courtney and her family, they’re our fake-cousins. We don’t share a family tree, but Courtney and her brothers can be found in every one of my birthday party pictures. Their little voices can be heard in the background of home videos from my childhood. Her parents are in my parents’ wedding album, and their faces grace our Christmas tree every year in the form of homemade photo ornaments. They’re our adverse possession family.

When Courtney was in labor with her first child, I gave my boss 10 minutes’ notice, then left the office and drove to Houston. Courtney and I hadn’t been spending much time together then. But that’s how it is with fake-cousins sometimes. You grow up, you grow apart. But you show up—graduations, bachelorette parties, weddings, funerals. You don’t talk in months, but you leave work with 10 minutes’ notice and drive through the night for the birth of their kids.

I hadn’t been to a hospital in years. I remember seeing Courtney reclined on an oversized hospital bed, swollen from preeclampsia. Even then, when she was told of her son’s complications, his rare syndrome, surrounded by wires and screens and strangers, she opened herself up to the nurses as casually as if reclining at her favorite coffee shop with an old friend. At the time, I was concerned she was disassociating from the trauma, but now I see how she—with all her flaws and gifts—was so perfectly meant for this little boy. When I gave birth to my daughter years later at the height of the COVID pandemic, I remembered Courtney’s self-assuredness, her confidence. And I realized just how miraculous it was.

Before leaving yesterday, I stopped by the fridge for a glimpse of that photo—the one of us when we were kids at Blueberry Hill Farm. It was stuck to the fridge in the same acrylic frame, in the same spot, for 25 years. After a quick look, I grabbed yet another bottle of sunscreen, then helped load our crew in the car—the third generation of blueberry pickers.

We got the blueberries, the blueberry-zucchini bread, some videos, and a fresh sunburn. But we also got a new fridge photo. Maybe the picture we took yesterday will be the one my daughter grows up with, the one that’ll stick to the fridge for the next 25 years, the one she glimpses just before she loads her crew in the car to go blueberry picking with their fake-cousins.

Having kids is like that. You can’t help but see the world through the lens of legacy. When that first photo was taken, my parents stood where I stand now. And the way I feel when I look at my daughter—it’s a well-worn row that my own parents walked. And still walk. It’s strange to realize that we may only understand how loved we are through the lens of loving someone else. Miraculous, even.

Courtney’s three kids took up most of the photo frame this year. We still only have one, though not for lack of trying. (And the one, the ravenous woodland creature, keeps us plenty busy). Conversations with fertility specialists, the endless stream of suggestions, the overwhelming weight of uncertainty. It’s miserable. I wish I were self-assured, presumptively confident. I wish for the faith of a child.

As I write this, I’m enjoying the last of the blueberry-zucchini bread. It’s fluffy but decadent. There’s a gooey zing from the blueberries, all sunk to the bottom. Baked and caramelized, they add a jammy-ness to the otherwise light bread. But I prefer my blueberries like my daughter does—fresh from the bushel basket.

I scroll through yesterday’s videos and photos, and I see the legacy grow. I see bushel baskets heaped high with blueberries and more empty bottles of sunscreen. And maybe next year or the year after, there will be more kids in the photo—more pink, plump babies. We’ll dress them in bucket hats and overalls and line them up in front of the unruly bushes. We’ll buy more acrylic frames and make room on the fridge.

I don’t know who will be in those photos, or whose faces will show up on our Christmas tree in the years to come, but I know that we’ll be back. We’ll be back to walk the well-worn rows of Blueberry Hill Farm in the record-breaking Texas heat. We’ll be back because Courtney will extend the invitation, as she always does. And her family—they’re our family. Our fake-cousins.

I’m confident we’ll be back, presumptively so. It’s a Texas tradition, after all.

A marketing professional for over a decade, Sarah has experience in media, the creative arts, and writing for brands. Whatever she works on—from talking points to television commercials—she works through the lens of narrative. She is constantly urging her clients and peers to consider: What’s the story? Who’s the protagonist? How does it end? 

Sarah has an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. She lives in Dallas with her husband and two young daughters — a toddler, and a (new) baby.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

We are huge fans of messy stories. Uncomfortable stories. Stories of imperfection.

Life isn’t easy and in this gem of a book, Amy Ferris takes us on a tender and fierce journey with this collection of stories that gives us real answers to tough questions. This is a fantastic follow-up to Ferris’ Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis and we are all in!

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Suicide with a Side of Pasta

October 21, 2023
suicide

CW: suicide, attempted suicide

The psychiatric clinic just on the outskirts of Paris was very posh: a restored sixteenth century stone exterior that reminded me of the relais—country houses—that aristocratic families built when they wanted to get away from the monarch’s court. The clinic’s lobby and dining rooms were beautifully appointed with expensive furnishings. My psychiatrist had recommended I stay there for a couple of weeks to receive treatment for my worsening depression.

I had one of the largest patient rooms. A bedroom big enough to waltz in, with the northern light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Private bath. Embroidered bell-pull if I needed anything from the staff. The shrinks came to talk with me once a day. I lied to them about how bad I was feeling, not wanting to admit what an idiot I was for still living with Michael. I only wanted to get back to the Paris apartment to make sure Michael wasn’t sleeping with men in our bed. After everything that had happened, I knew I shouldn’t give a damn, but I did. My real therapy was painting.

I pulled up a dressing table to the window where I began an illumination of St. Francis taming the wolf. I was thinking of the medal I’d given Michael on our trip to Assisi, the one he said the mugger had stolen, another one of his lies. What was I trying to work out? Did I want to replace the lost medal with my artwork? Or could it be that I wanted to be like St. Francis, using love to tame the wild wolf, to domesticate my roaming husband and lure him back to my home and heart. St. Francis was Michael’s favorite saint, and though I couldn’t replace the medal, I thought an illumination would show my love for him. Anything to bring back the version of the man I still loved so much. Unsure of what I hoped to achieve, I started drawing it anyway.

I knew I didn’t want to be alone. So, I called a friend. “Beth, I’m in a psych clinic in Paris. Can you possibly come be with me?” I asked. “The doctors are dismissing me this weekend. I gotta get out of here.”

I so needed to be with a friend who knew both Michael and me. Beth had stayed with us many times in Paris. I’d told her of Michael’s affairs with young men, prostitutes who only wanted his money—my money that my parents had put aside and left to provide a secure future for me and my husband. She knew how devastated I was. We talked several times a week, and I poured out my outrage and grief to her.

“Of course, I’ll come. Matter of fact, I can stay for a week.” she told me. “How are you coping? How long have you been in this clinic?”

“Not doing too well. Michael hasn’t been to see me,” I said, trying not to cry. “He hasn’t even called. I’ve been here over two weeks—I gotta go home.”

“Stay put till I get there,” she said. “I’ll book a hotel near your apartment and you can stay with me. Before I come get you from the clinic, I’ll go by your place and see what’s up with Michael.”

***

“Have you been outside today?” Beth asked, hugging me when she got to my room. Her long blonde hair brushed my cheek. “Gorgeous weather, but cool. C’mon—you need some sunshine.”

I passively allowed her to swaddle me in blankets. There was a large terrace at the clinic where patients and visitors could view the Paris skyline, the Eiffel Tower, and Sacre Coeur. Better digs than my apartment, whose view was nil. It was “sous-sol,” meaning it was between the ground floor and the basement. It had originally been a coal cellar. From the clinic’s terrace I saw flowering trees, tulips below bursting from their winter solstice. Peace. Tranquility. New life. Maybe even hope.

“Did you go by the apartment?” I asked her. “Did you see Michael?”

Beth looked down, couldn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah. Apparently, he just woke up. He met me at the door with only a sheet tied around him,” she said. “The floor was a mess of other sheets, rumpled clothes, liquor bottles, and used condoms. We saw them at the same time. He looked at me defiantly.”

Beth said to Michael, “I thought you told Diane you wouldn’t be sleeping with men anymore.”

He said to her, “I never said that. I told her I wanted to stay married to her. Beth, I love Diane. But she’ll have to accept my new lifestyle.”

Then she turned to me, and asked kindly, “Are you okay with that? How d’you feel about going back there?”

“I’m not okay with that,” I said wearily. She was standing in front of me, leaning on the terrace bannister, and partially blocking my view of the Eiffel Tower.

“What’re you gonna do about it?” she asked. “How can you stop him?”

“I dunno yet,” I said.

“You wanna divorce him?” she asked. “Or at least, a separation?”

“Sure, I’ve thought about it,” I said, looking down at my hands, wringing the corner of a blanket. “But where would I go?”

“Why the fuck should you go anywhere?” she cried, defending me. “Boot his sorry, cheating ass out the door!”

“I can’t.” I felt defeated. “I keep thinking I can make our marriage work, if I can just hang in there,” I persisted. “I don’t want to live without him.”

“But you can live without him,” she said. “You’re so much stronger than you think you are.”

I had issued an ultimatum to Michael during one of our counseling sessions. “If you continue to have these affairs, it’s over.” He only shrugged, as if to say, “What are you gonna do about it if I do?” I was coming to terms with the fact that I had no boundaries and Michael knew it too.

A week or so later, we had tickets to a piano concert in Paris. Michael was especially complimentary of my appearance that evening, declaring his oft-repeated remark about how proud it made him feel to be with me. Each of these compliments boosted my ego, my belief that he loved me, that perhaps things could and would change.

“My god, you look stunning tonight!” he said.

Even though it was considered bourgeois to “dress” for concerts, operas, art openings, we had always loved dressing up, and saw no reason to quit just because it was the current Paris fashion to wear jeans everywhere. I’d taken great care with my makeup, even putting a shimmery stroke of highlighter on my cheeks and collarbones. I wore a sheer, gold and silver embroidered, navy silk tunic over a navy tank top and leggings. I did look stunning!

In the taxi, he casually mentioned that he was going to Cologne for his boyfriend Voss’s twentieth birthday party. “I’ll be gone for the weekend, but I’ll be back on Monday,” he said.

I knew who Voss was—I’d seen his picture. He was Jordanian. Michael had rhapsodized about him more than once, often in the same sentence when he’d gushed about Tristan, his lover in Canada. My whole body stiffened, but I finally managed to say, “No, you’re not going. You can’t keep doing this to me!”

“Oh Diane, stop with the drama.” He looked out the taxi window, bored, but not upset. “I told Voss I’d be there—he’s counting on me.”

I asked the driver to stop. “Enjoy the concert,” I said to Michael. Getting out, slamming the door, I hailed another cab to take me home.

***

Our apartment was blessedly still, peaceful. I felt a sense of incredible relief wash over me like a cool breeze. The sense of stiffly and stoically holding it together was gone. I was alone and it felt so delicious and sweet, and it didn’t hurt that the spring Paris night smelled of lilacs.

I filled a large pot with salted water for pasta and turned on the gas burner, remembering nostalgically, when we were renovating the kitchen, how I’d stood my ground on getting a gas, rather than an electric stovetop. Michael loved my cooking.

“No one who cooks worth a damn,” I said, “cooks with electricity. You can’t control the temperature or the timing!”

“It’s gonna be way too expensive,” he argued. “Our building’s not fitted out for gas.”

“So, we’ll be the only ones who have it,” I said.

“I can’t justify the expense,” he said.

I played my last card. “Fine,” I said, “then we’ll eat all our meals out—I’m not cooking on electricity anymore.”

“Okay, okay. I give,” he said, throwing up his hands. “But you better crank out some pretty amazing dinners.”

***

As the water heated to boiling, I went through the hall closet and bathroom pantries grabbing every anti-depressant, every prescription painkiller and sleeping medication I could find. I also picked up Michael’s prescription meds. Had to make more than one trip in order to get them all. Bringing them to the kitchen, I spread them out on the granite countertop. There were a lot. I added fresh fettuccini to the boiling water.

Filling a large water glass, I calmly took every pill.

I’d accomplished everything I wanted to do, and what I hadn’t done wasn’t all that important. Our parents were dead. The Michael I had married was forever lost to me. My son Andrew was settled in his own happy life with his wife and kids. Sure, he’d miss me; the boys were little—they’d forget me soon enough, and I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone.

It was a quiet, rational decision: my wonderful fairy tale marriage had turned into a Stephen King horror film, and I didn’t know how to escape from it. I was numb. I felt no self-pity, no thought of punishing Michael. I just wanted out and could see no other way.  I didn’t write a suicide note—didn’t feel the need for melodrama.

By the time I’d taken all the pills, the pasta was ready to drain and season with cold-pressed virgin olive oil. I even added freshly chopped Italian parsley, expensive sea salt, and ground white, black and pink peppercorns. If this is gonna be the last thing I eat, it should be good.

I had done my research well—had googled “how to suicide” and discovered that unless pills were taken on a full stomach, they would likely be thrown up. I wanted to be sure I was successful.

Thinking I had time to die gracefully, I enjoyed my pasta, and didn’t rush to throw away the empty pill bottles. I was eating my last mouthful, feeling rather smug that I had pulled this off, when I heard the front door open. Just as Michael came in, I passed out on the kitchen floor.

I vaguely remember the EMTs cutting open the front of my fabulous, expensive Ralph Lauren tunic, thinking, please don’t ruin it! and being carried to the ambulance, but nothing more until I woke up from a coma four days later in the ICU. “No,” the nurse said when I asked. “Your husband hasn’t been here to see you.”

***

“The cops came to arrest and question me!” Michael fumed when he picked me up at the hospital. “They wanted to know what I’d had to do with your attempted suicide. Can you believe that? I was at the police station for nine fucking hours!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, even though I had nothing to apologize for.  “Why would they do that?” At this point, my sympathy for his arrest was about as real as his sympathy for my suicide attempt.

“They thought maybe I’d poisoned you, or urged you to take all those pills,” he said. “They even asked me if money was involved.”

“So, what’d you tell them?” I asked, not really caring, and still groggy from the meds they’d given me before I left the ICU. I just wanted to sleep again.

He shrugged. “I told them I loved you even though I was gay, and would never want you dead,” he said. “The first thing I did after I got back home was to call Andrew and all our friends in the States.”

“To tell them I’d failed at suicide?”

“That, and to let them know I was gay again,” he said, “even though I wanted to stay married. Funny, no one seemed surprised.”

“What’d Andrew say?” I asked.

“Said he’d figured I might be gay—had thought so for a year or two ‘cause I wasn’t paying as much attention to you as I had before,” he said. “How I was always going off without you. He was really cold to me when I told him about the police crap.”

Maybe that’s because you seem a lot more upset about being questioned by the police than the fact that I almost died, I thought. You narcissistic, self-centered little shit.

“Did he ask how I was doing?” I ventured.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “I told him you were out of the woods, that he didn’t need to come to Paris. Maybe you oughta call him—let him know you’re okay.”

But I’m not, I thought.  I tried to kill myself and you don’t even give a damn.

***

My suicide attempt left me feeling like my blood was icy; my heart a dull beating rock. I felt so cold and alone. Michael was no help to me. He was drinking himself into a stupor on a regular basis. I picked up the phone and called David, Michael’s alcohol therapist.

“David, please,” I said, “I just got out of the hospital from a suicide attempt. And I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Alive, but still really traumatized,” I said.

“I don’t usually work with the non-alcoholic partner in a relationship,” he said, “but because the alcoholic Michael is so closely linked to your own trauma, I’ll take you on as a client.”

My dead heart leapt a bit. Was there some life left in me? Some spark that Michael had not extinguished with his constant cheating, indifference, and boozy nights of horror?

I felt hopelessly stuck, doomed to stay in a sham of a marriage that was making both of us utterly miserable. Why? Because I had convinced myself that I couldn’t live without him. But that deeply flawed thinking had gotten us where we were: Michael had once tried to kill himself because, being gay, he couldn’t see himself in a straight marriage for the rest of his life. And I had tried killing myself because I couldn’t live in a marriage where my husband was having gay affairs.

Nothing I had done to try to fix our broken marriage had worked. Michael had decided he was “gay again,” but the truth was he had always been gay. Instead of trying to get him to give up his lovers and struggling to make him love me the way I needed to be loved, it occurred to me that maybe I should try to love myself, to save myself.

When I finally decided to change my life, everything changed. The smell of the air, the feel of my jacket, tight around my body. Food tasted better. The sun was warmer. The wind windier. Everything had new power. This is what happens when a co-dependent person separates from the source of their dependency. Of course, I felt scared, but there was this intoxicating freedom moving inside me, overshadowing the fear. I sprouted wings and new legs. I had ideas, I was full of life itself; all my old life had been sucked out of me. I felt, again, alive.

***

I called Andrew to tell him I was leaving Michael. There was silence on the crackly line and then he gave a sigh.

“Mom, I’m glad you’re divorcing him—just wish you’d made the decision a year ago. I love Pops,” he went on, “but you’ll be so much better off without him.”

“But I’ve never lived completely by myself,” I said. “The very thought of it scares me. I’m not sure of what I’ll do, or where I’ll live.”

“Mom, remember the last line in Mame? ‘Life is a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death.’ ”

“I remember,” I said, laughing through my tears.

“Well, keep repeating it to yourself. You’ve got the whole rest of your life to live and enjoy,” he said. “You survived your side of pasta, but Mom, you haven’t even gotten to the cheese course in this banquet!”

Diane Calvert is a medieval-style artist, a memoir writer, and she has recently begun a new “career” as a stand-up comic. From September to June she writes and does comedy in New York City. She spends summers in Noyers-sur-Serein, a tiny village in the back pocket of rural France where she creates medieval illuminations. She has had commissions from The Rare Book School in North Carolina, and has lectured at the Sorbonne in Paris on medieval art.

Her publishing credits include Angel et Démons dans la Littérature du Moyen Âge (Presses de L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne,) Mon Coeur Qui est Maître de Moi (Editions Alternatives,) and Tournaments Illuminated (Society for Creative Anachronism)

***

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“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, motherhood

On the Couch

October 19, 2023
couch

I was on the couch, enjoying a good book for once. It was summer. The pandemic was sort of over, and I wasn’t working without childcare, at least, as I’d been the last two years, and so sanity was hovering closer to the line of normal than usual, if you didn’t read the news.

We were in a heat wave. I basked in AC splendor, on the couch, and for most of the time I could forget about the impending electric bill—the cost of electric had gone up drastically this year and we hadn’t yet used our AC for a billing cycle, and who knew what to expect? Or the rats that had stationed themselves under our porch, probably due to the city’s construction. But also (and I don’t admit this to too many people) maybe due to our habit last winter of throwing Fuzzy’s bunny poops out the back door, one by one, when he’d mark his territory on the door mat?

I was enjoying a good book for once, on the couch. Ralph was snoring beside me, an eighty-pound heating pad, who occasionally transformed into a barking, nipping hot mess when anyone entered our home—including everyone he knew and didn’t know—eliciting extended family members to mutter, “I think he’s gotten worse.” George, a former children’s therapy dog, was elegantly splayed on her dog bed beside the gas fireplace, looking timeless, I told myself, even though, at thirteen, her clock was ticking.

I could never live without George. I could probably live without Ralph.

I was enjoying that great book, anyway, for some time, with my animal friends, in my lovely home that I was considering putting on the market, even though we’d have nowhere to go—because: rats. (I love this home, actually; I’ll never leave.

Unless I have to. Or want to.)

Such a good book, but after two hours passed, and Leo had been home from his run for one hour, the calm became too eerie, so I told Leo he could finally go upstairs and shower. He’d been drenched in sweat at first but it was now dried, and he was standing in the kitchen looking at videos on TikTok, I assumed, and smelling like onion salad, for sure. Now that he was shirtless, I wondered where he’d placed the shirt.

“It’s okay to wake them,” I said, releasing him of his purgatory, which would close the door to my splendor.

“Are you sure?”

“They’ll never sleep tonight if you don’t.” I felt low-blood-sugar suddenly. I kept my eyes on my book as he whiffed by.

Behind two glass doors before me the rabbit was nibbling on a stick of hay in his room—I mean the playroom that he’d overpowered—as though it were a cigar.

Leo descended the staircase minutes later without having showered. He had two hot muffins in tow: one, five years old and sweaty-cheeked with curly hair flinging itself free of a braid; she was bare-foot and leaning on the banister. The other, red and puffy, two years old, was in his arms.

“We,” the five-year-old said, proudly, “were in the attic! We were,” but her face changed as she watched my face, which must have been moving on its own without my telling it to, and so did her tone, “having an…adventure?”

In our attic—which is separated from the five-year-old by another room and a door that is suctioned shut by a long shard of insulation foam—is glassy-breaky-stuff, a giant air conditioner with lots of tubes that looks like the inspiration for the next Stranger Things villain, and worst of all two windows that curiously peer toward the yard and the road, and whose sufficiency I’ve still never tested. Anxiety surged, as it’s wont to do.

During my moment of rest, my children could have fallen out the windows.

My sanity equals my dead children.

I wasn’t even resting that much.

The book dropped. I examined my children. I interrogated the one who talked well: “How are you feeling? Did you touch the AC? Did you touch the windows? Are you okay? Are you too hot? Were you ever afraid you couldn’t get out?” I said some of these questions out loud until I forced myself to let the others leak out more gradually.

Leo said, “They were just calmly sitting there reading.”

“Wow,” I said.

“They had also gotten out our old wedding vases” (enter: glassy-breaky-stuff).

“It’s okay to go up there,” I said to my five-year-old, “with a grownup. There are lots of sharp things up there. Do you have any splinters?”

It is my job to worry—I think—to protect them from danger.

“I don’t think so?” said my five-year-old, whose sense of adventure was, perhaps, being overshadowed by my sense of impending doom.

It is my job to be free and joyful—I think—to keep them alive.

“Let’s go up there again sometime, all together,” I said, smiling. “I’m glad you had fun. You’re not in trouble. We’ll do it safely next time.”

Her expression suggested suspicion.

The littler one said, “I’m poopin’, Mama.”

I knew she was done pooping, and that she just had not yet mastered the use of past-tense, but I was tired, so I said, “Are you still poopin’?”

“Da,” she said, which meant yes. Which just meant she didn’t want me to change her. Which was fine with me.

That bought some more time on the couch. Leo went up to shower and the two girls and I sat on the couch and read the books they had found up there. I sat in the middle; their hot bodies warming me, so odious and sweet. A clean diaper and packet of wipes was nearby on the coffee table, a warning that this moment would never last, which made it all the purer. Their curly hair touching my chin.

George hadn’t moved from her slumber; she had entered a new stage of her life called don’t-give-a-fuck, of which I was jealous, even if it meant that attitude grew stronger, it seemed, the closer you got to dying. Maybe that was a consolation prize for it all being over some day—or a preview of the freedom yet to be.

I gave so many fucks.

I read a book about a hippo becoming friends with an ancient tortoise, which is totally against all reptilian instincts, and I nearly cried. My children were still close, and their sweat reminded me of the summer we inhabited, and the shower running upstairs hoped for Leo’s own relief, and the milkweed blooming outside kept the butterflies close, and the rabbit splayed out on his side in his room, his soft belly sighing, meant he was happy, so I was happy, and my children’s small hairs were sticking up from the cool of the AC on their backs and arms, and the sun streaming through the window made my littlest interrupt the reading multiple times to say, “I see sun, Mama,” and as I imagined their soft bodies pushed through the window glass of the attic, and landing with a thud, on the hard ground, forever, I had to imagine holding them tightly to me—I couldn’t squeeze them for real, as the older one, in becoming herself, was known to elbow me away.

Marni Berger holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic. Marni’s short story “Hurricane” appeared in The Carolina Quarterly 2020 summer issue and her short story “Edge of the Road with Lydia Jones” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (Matador Review). Her short story “Waterside” appeared in Issue 96 of Glimmer Train.

Marni’s work has also appeared at Motherwell, Barnstorm, The Manifest-Station, The Common, The Days of Yore, The Millions, Lotus-Eater, COG Magazine, The Critical Flame, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Fringe Magazine. She has been a finalist or received honorable mention in nine Glimmer Train contests and one New Millennium Writings contest. Marni’s novel-in-progress, Love Will Make You Invincible, is a dark comedy about a mother and her precocious tween, who, refusing to believe his long-lost father has committed suicide, instead becomes convinced that his father is a citizen of a secret underwater village. Marni lives in Portland, Maine.

She has taught writing at Columbia University and Manhattanville College. She currently teaches writing at University of Southern Maine.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

We are huge fans of messy stories. Uncomfortable stories. Stories of imperfection.

Life isn’t easy and in this gem of a book, Amy Ferris takes us on a tender and fierce journey with this collection of stories that gives us real answers to tough questions. This is a fantastic follow-up to Ferris’ Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis and we are all in!

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Abortion

What’s at Stake? Abortion Restrictions and Choice

October 16, 2023
women abortion alone

Will Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Rise in the Near Future?

When I was seventeen, I left my school, walked to Planned Parenthood a few blocks away and after discussing all my options, left with a safe and inexpensive method of birth control. I walked back to school confident that I would not add my story to the many accounts of Delfen Contraceptive Foam pregnancies. Babies spawned by the mighty sperm that swam bravely through the toxic sea, resulting in the victorious zygote. My classmates and I were not of the abstinence-only crowd. Our school had a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. Many of us has our own copies.

More than a decade later, I worked every-other Saturday at the same Planned Parenthood while my husband stayed home with our two-year-old. Most Saturday mornings there were protesters on the sidewalk. Sometimes they would say vile things or spit at us as they tried to block our path, knowing nothing about why these women were coming to Planned Parenthood. Not caring about their stories, but feeling great compassion for the clump of cells hidden in their uteri, protesters would attempt to dissuade women from entering the building, offering their prayers and their alternatives. Fueled by righteous indignation, the protesters were willing to fight for the rights of the unborn but not for the women who would bear them.

There are more than a hundred documented ways to induce an unsafe abortion. Methods are categorized by route of administration.

In the category of Taken by mouth: turpentine, bleach, acid, laundry bluing, anti-malarial drugs.

In the time I worked at Planned Parenthood, I never met a woman who wanted an abortion. This is just not something one wants. But I did meet women who needed an abortion. Shall I tell you their stories? Will you care?

Do you want to know about the 40-year-old who lived in her car with her young son and needed money for food? The man said he’d pay her extra if he didn’t have to use a condom. She decided to risk it. There were many others, but not a single death. Not one of those women left with a punctured uterus or bowel or an untreated infection that would leave them sweating and damaged.

There were the high-school girls who drove to Planned Parenthood with a trusted friend in nice cars their parents bought them. They had manicured nails and good haircuts and they cried like babies. I suspect they carry this still, this thing they can never talk about. This This act of desperation, this truth buried because no one must ever know. But the procedure was clean, and safe and they are alive now and taking their own daughters to their doctors for access to responsible, safe birth control paid for by their health insurance. Should the contraceptives fail, these girls will not need to swallow bleach. They can pay for the right to own their bodies.

Still, desperate women, facing the financial burdens and social stigma of unintended pregnancy will continue to risk their lives by undergoing unsafe abortions.

In the category of Foreign Bodies inserted in the Cervix: stick, wire, knitting needle, coat hanger, bicycle spoke, chicken bone, ballpoint pen.

I resigned from Planned Parenthood when my second pregnancy became apparent. I thought it would be cruel to wear maternity clothes there. But also, I quit to protect myself from the feeling I might have, already protective of the cells growing and replicating inside me. Already in love with who those cells would become.

Many of us who are pro-choice like to think we’re different from those women who seek abortions. I often hear such condescending statements as, “I could never have an abortion but I think it’s up to the woman to decide.”

Can you really say that? That you could never have an abortion? Have you ever been raped by an uncle, a brother, a father, five frat boys at a party? Have you ever been told that the baby you planned, the one for whom you’ve converted your home office to a nursery, bought tiny socks and t-shirts, poured over books of baby names, has a genetic anomaly with no chance of survival? Or that your pregnancy will put your life at risk, possibly orphan your two other children? Have you ever thought that under certain circumstances you might consider an abortion? Did you ever think that no matter your reason, that decision might not be yours to make?

In the category of Enemas: Soap, hot oil, laundry detergent, vinegar, coffee.

Beginning in 1973, following the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion, researchers demonstrated a dramatic decline in the number of deaths related to illegal abortion.

When denied access to safe abortion, women and adolescent girls with unwanted pregnancies will, as they always have, resort to unsafe, illegal means to terminate the pregnancy.

There is no way to tell how many girls and women died of sepsis, shaking with fever, afraid to tell of what they’d done. Or how many suicides resulted from failure to abort. A fact sheet published in September 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) lists barriers to accessing safe abortion as restrictive laws, high cost, poor availability of services, stigma, and unnecessary mandatory waiting periods. That fact sheet tells us that estimates from 2010 to 2014 showed that around 45% of all abortions were unsafe and that almost all of these unsafe abortions took place in developing countries. Here in America with access to safe abortion, we had no need for bicycle spokes or chicken bones.

Texas lawmakers smiled and made heart symbols with their hands as they signed what they call the Fetal Heartbeat Law. Legislation that will put the lives of girls and women, whose hearts also beat, in danger. Texas took us back to a dark time in history as governors in a half-dozen other states, emboldened by the inaction of the Supreme Court, nodded their approval and planned their next move.

Today, we’ve returned to 1972.  We may be on a path to align our maternal morbidity and mortality statistics with those of Africa and Asia as we deny women access to safe, legal abortion.

Eileen Vorbach Collins is an RN and award-winning essayist. She has been both a client and employee of Planned Parenthood. She’s glad she’s old, but is very worried about the health and safety of girls and women. Eileen’s work has been published in SFWP, Barren Magazine, The Columbia Journal and a number of other literary magazines as well as Shondaland, Next Avenue and the NYT Tiny Love Stories.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

We are huge fans of messy stories. Uncomfortable stories. Stories of imperfection.

Life isn’t easy and in this gem of a book, Amy Ferris takes us on a tender and fierce journey with this collection of stories that gives us real answers to tough questions. This is a fantastic follow-up to Ferris’ Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis and we are all in!

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Fiction

The Same Country

October 14, 2023
bobby

My best friend Kate gathers my thick brown hair into a ponytail and shakes it gleefully. “I’ve been waiting a hundred years for this day! You sure?”

“Positive.” I haven’t done more than trim my hair since my mother died six years ago. But now it’s time for it to go. The wavy bulk, the split ends—all of it must go. I’m sitting under a bald lightbulb in the chilly, unfinished basement of my fiancé’s South Side bungalow. I watch in the mirror as Kate straps on her hairdresser’s holster. Her tiger-print pouch holds scissors, combs, sheers, a razor, and complicated clippers.

“You’re the only one I’d trust to do this,” I say. “But not at Sassoon.” I just can’t waltz into her Gold Coast salon with all those contrast-heavy Nagel prints of Joan Collins and sultry, red-lipped brunettes. I don’t want a bunch of fussy hairdressers giving me the side-eye for my French braid.

Kate pulls a comb from her pocket. “What about Bobby?”

“That’s why we have to hurry!”

“He’s going to freak.”

“Maybe not. And, it’s going to be a big change. I can understand…”

“Does he come straight home after market close?” she asks.

“It’s Monday, so he might come straight home.”

“We’ve got a couple hours,” she says. I close my eyes, not wanting to think or worry about Bobby’s reaction, and what this radical hair change will mean to him, or how it might manage to offend him. But I’ve made up my mind. I need a change.

“Let me make a braid. You can save it,” Kate says.

“For him?”

“For you.” Kate digs the comb into my scalp and divides it into three thick plaits. The comb hurts, but I can take it. She binds it with a hair tie, then starts to braid, mildly painful tugs at my temples. “Have you got anymore shit from people about the holiday party?”

“No. And at least I don’t have to see anybody until after winter break.”

“They’ll get over it.”

“I dunno,” I say. “They thrive on gossip.”

“Bunch of pretentious assholes.”

I won’t defend my fellow grad students because their pretentiousness is the one topic on which Kate and Bobby agree. But I want to be accepted by my art-school cohort more than my best friend and fiancé could understand. The photos I’ve shown this first semester of my MFA haven’t been great. It’s hard enough to be judged on my art, but I’m also judged for being twenty-four and already bound to a twenty-seven-year-old stockbroker who acts like he’s forty. Everybody else in the program is so free—making out, staying out, clubbing. At the holiday party, Bobby fulfilled all their expectations, by being an arrogant jackass. He argued about the inflated art market with my professor, Peter. Kate might be right that my program mates are pretentious, but Bobby didn’t need to be so ruthlessly rational about the long-shot nature of what we’re all trying to do: be artists. Is it so farfetched to imagine making a living this way?

Kate’s scissors catch the light from the dangling bulb as she opens them. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“I swear this is going to look awesome.”

It’s not easy to cut through my thick hair, but Kate has the strongest hands of any woman I know. She saws through the hair and hands me the heavy dark braid. I drop it in the hammock of my skirt and close my knees to hide it.

“You down with the Annie Lennox look?” Kate asks.

“I think so.” Annie Lennox has a bleached-blond crewcut. Sweet dreams are made of this. Princesses have long hair, braids that touch the floor. I think of Rapunzel trapped in a castle. I think of Samson, and I hope that Kate’s right, that cutting off my hair will have the opposite effect: I will gain power by losing it. She thinks this is all about changing my style, getting edgier. She doesn’t know about Peter’s cutting remarks during critique about apple-cheeked Midwestern girls in overalls and braids. Even a pixie cut won’t work. I need something drastic, something not docile: a crewcut. I want walk into the photo studio looking like totally different person next semester. Maybe I’ll feel that way too.

I’ve tried to act tough in class, but I’m not a great actress. I can’t stay in character. I slip back into being nice again, because—because of the Midwest. That’s how they all see me. The first week of class, L.A. Vivian said, “You look so apple-cheeked today, Maggie.” I was wearing Clinique blush. I must have put on too much. Now they sometimes call me the Michigan Apple, even though I’m from Chicago. She said my photos of garbage cans in alleys reminded her of “after-school specials” about poverty. That my photos pothole puddles, cyclone fences overtaken by weeds in vacant lots would make great calendars. Once Vivian Clark says you’re on that boring Urban Decay bandwagon, or the Peter says your work is “poverty tourism,” then there’s nothing you can do. Nobody takes your side. Your work gets worse because of it. Even I couldn’t find the rosy spin.

Kate’s scissors whiz around my head, cutting as close to the scalp as she can. She pulls out her electric shaver and runs it up my neck. The razor buzzes, it whirs, it’s the sound of my father shaving. It’s a masculine song in my ears. I start to believe in it.

The razor moves over the slight bump on my head, a spot that’s always been sensitive. I once fell backward onto manhole cover.  Every time the tine of a comb or the foil heads of Kate’s razor touch that spot, I remember the summer day, sitting on a neighbor’s lawn, when a neighbor boy playfully pushed me backward, and my head bounced off the metal. The grass was so high, we hadn’t seen the sewer cover. A lump popped up and never completely went away. But what has lingered most in my mind is Joey’s remorse, how sorry he felt, and how sweet his apologies seemed, coming from a boy.

Kate moves over to the cement utility sink, and I touch my hair, feel the soft bristles. My spine shivers with the chill. I’m colder without all that hair on my neck. I open my knees and warm my hands under the braid, cradling this weighty manifestation of my past.  Would I dare to do this if my mother were still alive?  I look over as Kate attaches a rinsing hose to the tap, then tests the temperature with her index finger. She blows into a pair of rubber gloves and slips them on. She pours a packet of powder into a steel bowl, adding water, and whipping it with a boxy brush. I love watching her. She looks so professional, even if she is wearing a blue flannel, ripped jeans, and leather motorcycle boots. Her own short hair is Flock-of-Seagulls long on top, with a spot of blue at the temple.  She skipped college and went straight to beauty school after high school, and she’s worked her way up to Sassoon. She’s a coveted, always booked hairdresser, and she makes so much cash she doesn’t need to work for months at a stretch, which supports her great passion: backpacking in far-flung locales. She’s heading to Thailand in April to meet up with an Irish girl she met in India. She’s in love.

She wags the peroxide brush at me. “You sure you don’t want to stick with your natural hair color? This isn’t going to tickle.”

“Positive.”

Kate dips the brush in the paste and starts to layer on the peroxide, and at first, it’s cool, but then it starts to really tingle and burn. This burning feels like an initiation, and when I grit my teeth with the pain of it, Kate says,“You’ll live.”

In my neighborhood, we goad each other on with these phrases: You’ll live. It won’t kill ya. It’s a question of degree. Take any difficult situation. If it won’t kill ya, then you’ll get over it.

Kate carefully stretches a shower cap over my burning head, and then sets a timer for 40 minutes. While we wait, she pops a cassette of X’s More Fun in the New World in my boombox. The opening riffs get me off the stool, makes me cock my head pigeon style. Kate turns it up louder, so I can’t hear the shower cap crinkling in my ears anymore.  We thrash around the basement, dancing, playing air bass. We dance with no inhibitions, mirroring each other’s hackneyed and comical pirouettes, and when one of us settles into serious oneness with the music, the other lifts an arm, training an invisible spotlight on the other, nodding in head-thrashing approval.   When we sing, “We’re having much more fun!” I feel like we’re shouting at all our enemies. To the tune of an aggressive, exhilarating punk backbeat, we mix all the dance moves from two decades of friendship: the monkey, the nose-dive, the twist, the bump. Kate jabs a finger at the low ceiling, punk John Travolta-style, and comes back with cobwebs threaded between her fingers. She shakes them off, laughing, then grabs my hand and we do a rockabilly jitterbug, spinning each other across the concrete. We’re panting by the end of the “Breathless,” so we raid the basement fridge and chug a couple of Bobby’s Michelobs. We use her hairbrushes as microphones to serenade each other. “I must not think bad thoughts!” We shimmy to the floor, we do bad ballet moves till we’re spent, till the timer ding-ding-dings.

She leads me to the sink, and I lean back in a swivel office chair so my neck rests on the cold lip of the sink. The warm water feels wonderful, as she rinses away the peroxide. Water drips into my mouth and it tastes like metal. I arise from the cement basin a clown, my brown hair now Ronald McDonald orange.

“What the—”

“Don’t worry. This is actually the ‘Sweet Dreams’ color. You need the ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ color.”

“I don’t have the bone structure to pull off orange hair,” I say.

“Nobody does.”

“You do,” I say. Because Kate is a 5-foot-9 knockout lesbian who came out to me a couple years ago. With all she’s had to deal with, growing up where we do, you’d think I’d have the guts to tell her what’s really been happening in grad school. It’s not that I don’t trust her. I’m just not ready to admit some things, even to myself. Behind Peter’s put-downs, I sense something else—like he’s cutting me down and coming on to me too. Which I really don’t get.  I’ve caught him many times glancing at my engagement ring, the 2-carat cathedral solitaire that Bobby had chosen himself.

Kate wheels me back to the center of the room, and I cradle my braid, as she layers on the peroxide. It doesn’t hurt as much, but still I wince when she brushes that tender spot, and I’m not reminded of the freckles on remorseful Joey’s cheeks; no, I’m remembering the clank of my head against the manhole cover.

“Hurting?” Kate asks.

“Beer helps.” Yet the initial buzz is dwindling into a queasy fatigue, and a glance at the clock fills me with familiar dread. It’s after four, and Bobby might be home in twenty minutes and if not, then he won’t be home for hours.  For once, I’m hoping that he goes out drinking with his trader buddies.

After we rinse out the final coat of peroxide, Kate towel-dries my hair and then works in a cool, silky toner.  “This will make it more lemony.”

She guides me toward the mirror, and I stare at my face. The stark hip hair is a stranger’s. My ears stand out like two washed pieces of marble. My brown eyes look huge against the lemony-white hair.

“Do I look like an alien?”

“Like a foxy alien, baby!” Kate says.

A car door slams in the driveway. Bobby’s home. Kate and I lock eyes. We both get quiet, the only sound the tumble of towels in the dryer. His dryer. I count the empty beer bottles, wanting to toss them quick, but we hear the squeak of his Ferragamo wingtips coming down the basement steps before we have a chance to prepare. Kate grabs her fancy scissors and holds up her hands, showing her weapon. She rolls her eyes, cementing our regression to rebellious kids, with Bobby cast as the Grown-up, the established, hetero male, the college grad, the captain of industry. It’s a force we’ve always rebelled against, and Kate still can’t quite understand how I fell for Bobby two years ago.  Kate’s never spoken against him expressly, while he’s always seen her, my friend who I’ve known since birth, as a threat.

As he comes into the basement, I’m flooded with both dread and a strong desire to melt against his gray suit jacket, to get ahead of his response. My fiancé is 6” 2’, lean as a greyhound, with pearl-grey eyes and straight brown hair. The only way Bobby can reach a state of light-heartedness is if he’s high as a kite or having sex, which means the bedroom is the only place where I can win.  Bobby’s very sensitive, but others don’t get it, they don’t see what I see in him. Though sometimes I wonder what the difference is between sensitivity and touchiness.  Where do you draw the line?

He sets a pile of mail down on top of a table. “Somebody’s parked in the driveway! What the hell, Maggie? What’d you—What’d she do to your hair?”

“Don’t blame Kate,” I said.

“How’s it going, Bobby?” Kate throws back her shoulders and shakes a Camel out of her pack.

“Jesus H. Christ. You look like a dyke, Maggie.”

Kate snorts,. “Nice, Bobby.” She places the cigarette between her lips, freeing her hands so she can zip up her leather jacket. “Look, Mags, I gotta split. Call me tomorrow.”

“Sorry, Kate. He didn’t mean it that way.”

“What do I care?” Bobby throws up his hands, dropping his head and stooping in the exasperated gesture of the Misunderstood Man. “It’s your hair!”

“It sure is, Mags.” Kate says, as she heads toward the stairs. “And hold on to that braid. Maybe I can reattach it for your wedding.”

Bobby starts collecting the beer bottles and putting them in a can by the sink.  After I hear the door shut behind Kate, I turn to him, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. “I can dye it dark again if that’s what you really want,” I say.

“I can’t picture a wedding veil on that hair. Are you planning to wear a tux, too?”

“Our wedding day is two years away.”

“You’ll need white combat boots,” he says.

Upstairs in the guest room closet is a shoe rack full of pumps in in every shade—black, red, navy, even powder blue. When we met, Bobby said all my funky flats looked like waffle irons. I was blown away when he took me shopping and spent hundreds on new pumps. “I don’t want to even think about a wedding till I’m done with grad school.”

“And maybe we can both have best men!” he says. “Or Kate can be your Man of Honor.”

“Shut up. She’s not even butch. She’s a total femme.”

“She’s a total femme!” he mocks me.  “She’s in love with you.”

“That’s so stupid it’s not even insulting. She’s my best friend.”

“How do you know for sure though?”

“I know for sure because I know for sure.”

“You’re so naïve. It’s like those assholes in your program. You’re so much better than them. You can’t see the truth. They’re a bunch of wannabes.”

“There’s a huge difference between Kate and them.”

“I’m just trying to help you. Remember what I said. You have to check people’s passports. You can’t just let anyone invade your borders.”

“Kate and I are from the same country.”

“Maybe. But she’s moved to a whole other continent.” He twirls his finger by his temple.

“She’s moved to Lincoln Park. To get away from all the racist bigots around here.”

“So you’d rather be with all the fruits, nuts, and flakes around Wrigley?”

“I’m fine on the South Side. I like our neighborhood.”

“I’ve got my eye on a bigger house,” he says. “With a coach house. So you can have a studio.”

“Really?” I immediately picture a yellow clapboard coach house with a pitched-roof and rectangular skylights. I’d have a shelf for all my cameras, light stands, light modifiers and reflectors. Maybe some backdrops too. I see vertical files filled with slides, and I can almost smell the vinegar tang of the developing fluids I’ll have in the basement dark room. “When did you start looking? You didn’t tell me.”

“Just put the word out to Tommy Costa. He’s doing real estate now. The Bozo franchise thing didn’t work so hot, surprise surprise. But we’d probably need tenants in a coach house to cover the mortgage the first couple of years.”

“I knew there had to be a catch.”

“What do you want from me, Maggie? I’m already paying—”

“My tuition. I know. I know.”

“Well, you and Kate act like I’m some overbearing ogre. I’m doing my best here.”

“I know you are.” I walk over and hug him, draping my arms around his neck. His hands reach for my waist, and he pulls me close. His tight embrace always seems to swallow me, as I’m a good six inches shorter than he is. My mouth pressed to the itchy wool of his suit jacket, I say, “I know” again.  I know how far he’s come. His mother always expected the most from him—valedictorian, captain of the football team, yet it was never enough. To others in the neighborhood, she’d brag about “Her Bobby,” but at home, with him, she could hold a three-day’s grudge if he forgot to take out the garbage. Ignoring a ten-year-old for two or three days demands a particular talent. People in the neighborhood didn’t know that she’d been caught stealing a can of tuna when Bobby was five. She had planted the can in the back pocket of his pants, but a cashier noticed it and asked him to put it on the checkout belt. But his mother made a production out of it, scolding him and insisting that the cashier call the manager. Bobby stood shamefaced, unable to tuck his face into his mother’s lap, as the manager scolded him, while his mother opened up her wallet to show all the dollars she had, more than enough to pay for a pitiful can of Chicken of the Sea.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” he asks. “Should I order a ‘za?”

“Yeah. I’ll clean up down here.”

He heads up the stairs, and I grab a broom from the utility closet. His basement’s layout is exactly like the house I grew up in, where my dad still lives, alone. I knew Bobby only from a distance back in high school. It wasn’t till I was a junior at DePaul that our worlds overlapped. His pursuit of me was swift; he outflanked his rivals with traditionally romantic maneuvers that he dubbed “pitching woo”: chocolates, roses, Anaïs Anaïs eau de toilette. He ascribes to the dyad of Maggie-and-Bobby as some kind of holy force, but I don’t really need a creed to stay committed in the same way he does. If you read his love letters you’d think that we were engaged in an endless crusade against a cruel world, especially the meddling forces of most of my friends. He uses phrases like “true love,” which, I’ve noticed recently that X calls “The Devil’s chokehold.”

I sweep the stray hairs into a pile on the cement floor, then pick up the braid from the top of the washing machine. Wrapping it like a stole around my neck cuts the draft of cold air that wafts down my damp collar. I touch my head, and the bristles tickle my fingertips. Rubbing the soft fur on the back of my neck feels like petting a hamster backwards, a happy comfort that I wish Bobby could experience. What’s the big deal, anyway? It’s just hair. As my mother used to say, “It’ll grow back.” That’s the tack I should take with Bobby. He gets in a funk about stuff like this, and he needs me to lighten the mood. That’s how we work best. Isn’t that what love means? Your bad point, my good point. Puzzle pieces that fit together? It’s perfectly natural, I think, for a glimmer of pity to underpin one’s love.

Eileen Favorite’s first novel, The Heroines (Scribner, 2008), has been translated into six languages. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many publications, including, The Toast, Triquarterly, The Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, Diagram, and others. Her essay, “On Aerial Views,” was a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2020. Eileen was named a 2021 Illinois Arts Council Awardee for nonfiction. She teaches teach writing and literature classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. her TEDx Talk, “Love the Art, Hate the Artist” is available at eileenfavorite.com.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Relationships

Holy Ground

October 11, 2023
grand canyon

I didn’t want to hike the Grand Canyon.

April is the golden time in Phoenix, when the sun burns just warm enough for hike-and-pool days but not so hot to warrant an escape up north. After a morning trek up Piestewa Peak, Kyle and our friend Andy relax on a couple pool chairs, sipping cold beers and scheming up an adventure for the dry-heat days ahead. Next to them, I sit cross-legged in my pool chair with a red pen and stack of papers in my lap, going through my most recent essay and making up for the writing time I lost to the morning hike.

Andy insists on the Grand Canyon, declaring the national park his favorite place in the world.

Kyle and I look at each other, both thinking the same thing: How could the Grand Canyon be his favorite place in the world? A year earlier we had walked the rim a year, and we agreed that the crater looked the same no matter where you stood. We had taken several pictures of the view, glad to finally see the iconic landmark, but we weren’t itching to go again.

But Andy doesn’t let up. “You have to hike down it to get the full experience. You can’t just walk the rim and call it a day.”

This convinces Kyle, and I just smile at the thought of having a weekend to myself at the apartment, locked indoors by the summer heat, writing without distractions. I don’t care to go on Andy’s adventure to prove the Grand Canyon has more to it. The trip involves camping…outside…and hiking down dozens of switchbacks before hiking right back up, a twisted order of doing things.

Kyle understands. Camping and hiking are his things.

Writing is mine.

I didn’t know what I’d write while the boys adventured at the Grand Canyon, but I knew I needed that time block to see where it took me.

#

Andy tells us a statistic – of the three million people who visit the Grand Canyon every year, only one percent hikes down in it.

Being different is Kyle’s thing. Being with people, keeping a full social calendar, exploring, traveling – these are all Kyle’s things. My curious, extroverted, nature-seeking husband keeps an eye out for the exciting and the new.

I am an introvert and home body by nature, and my husband’s favorite things often make me anxious. I want to be adventurous for him and experience the things he most enjoys, but I also want to be true to myself. All I want to do is write. Ever. Always.

 #

This writing-or-experiencing debate has come up in different ways since I first moved in with Kyle, back in Iowa. One of the questions then: Do I spend the day writing or join Kyle and our friends tailgating for the Iowa State game? Kyle always invited me to go, but the thought of giving up a full day of writing to play drinking games with people we hung out with all the time made me cringe. His friends often asked him about me if I didn’t go, and part of me wished I was closer with them.

One of those Saturdays, I joined him at eight a.m. for the tailgate and brought my backpack. I planned to sit with the group for an hour, get some face time in, then when they’d all get too tipsy to notice I’d walk off to a coffee shop and write.

But I got to talking to the girls at the tailgate. Most of them, like me, came into this group because our significant others all partied together in college. Chatting with them, I understood that I wasn’t the only one who felt out of place. Like me and my writing, they each had a life of their own beyond this day of tailgating and drinking games. The writer in me was curious to know more about them.

So I took my backpack off and challenged them to a game of flippy cup.

I can’t deny that my most compelling stories and memories have happened when I tried out Kyle’s things, even if I slightly dreaded them. Most often I end up beyond glad that I joined him. With a new perspective, I come back ready to write and create with all the new spontaneity and spark within me.

Which is what I’m thinking about when I finally give in after Andy’s umpteenth request. I desperately want to write for a weekend, but the more Andy builds it up the more curious I become about what the Grand Canyon looks and feels like when you go below the surface. I have a feeling it might be life-changing, like most of those experiences I initially dread because they force me out of my comfort zone.

The week of the trip, I decide to embrace the adventure – I look forward to the camping, the backwards hiking, all of it. I make a grocery store run and gather energy bars and ingredients for trail mix. I tell everyone at work about my exciting weekend ahead. If I’m not going to spend the time writing, I am going to have fun with what I choose to do instead.

 #

On a Friday evening in mid-May, we leave the sweltering heat of Phoenix and arrive at our campsite in Flagstaff two hours later, what feels like a different part of the world. The wind reminds me of below-zero wind chill days in the Midwest, although thankfully, the temperature is a kinder fifty degrees.

Kyle and Andy fight the weather to get the tents up, then we drive into town so the guys can reward themselves with Flagstaff’s craft beers. I enjoy a hard kombucha, clinking their glasses and cheering to my first real camping adventure.

No part of me wants to camp the night before a twelve-mile hike. I don’t sleep. The wind provides a nice white noise but its shattering gusts keep anyone from sinking into a dream. I lie in the tent uncomfortable and nervous, knowing what an unpleasant person I am without a good night’s sleep. We are all in for a long day together when the sun comes up.

 #

After so many tailgates in Iowa, I still caught myself referring to the group as “Kyle’s friends.” I had gotten to know all these girls, but we still had our own friends and our own lives and we never got together outside of tailgates. Unlike the guys, we didn’t have four years at Iowa State to bond us.

So I started something – Girls of the Crew, for all of us girlfriends who came to the group by default – and it took off. Everyone picked something they wanted to do – dessert and wine night, bounce center and tumbling, brunch and mimosas, housewarming parties. Everyone freaking loved it, and we all suddenly belonged in the group that wasn’t ours.

The week before I moved to Arizona, the girls threw me a going-away dinner. After I’d moved, they mailed me a home decor sign they’d made at one of their girls group dates since I’d left. Girls of the Crew still thrives today, four years later, and I Skype in for happy hours, baby showers, and girls’ nights.

If I had stayed home from those tailgates, I might not have those ten extra girlfriends who add a world of color to my life, who ask me every time we meet how my book is coming.

Socializing, I started to realize, gave me an opportunity to talk about my writing, to speak up about the project I’m working on, while connecting with the audience whom my work is largely intended for. Having friends I’m close with allows me the space to go deeper about my passions rather than trying to impress them by sharing details about a job I don’t care about.

I guess socializing can kind of be my thing, too.

#

At five a.m., we pack up the tents and drive the rest of the way to the Grand Canyon. A hot cup of coffee makes up for the windy, sleepless night. I spend the thirty-minute car ride combining almonds and peanuts and dried cranberries and banana chips to make the perfect trail mix.

The top of the Grand Canyon feels as bitter cold as sleeping in the tent in Flagstaff. We start our hike wearing leggings, long sleeves, and hats, but after about a half hour of descending switchbacks, we start sweating and peeling layers. The sun grows warmer the deeper we go, poking through and kissing our skin. We descend for four-and-a-half miles before a one-and-a-half-mile flat stretch to Plateau Point.

If I stayed home, I’d still have one image of the Grand Canyon – the same view from the rim that the other ninety-nine percent of tourists have.

If I stayed home, I’d be left wondering why Andy deemed this his favorite place in the world.

If I stayed home, I might have the beginnings of another essay about something from my past scribbled in a notebook.

But here I am, six sweaty miles down into the Grand Canyon, with something new to write about. The sleeplessness from the night before – and the fact that I left my perfect trail mix in the car – is forgotten, replaced by the adrenaline of truly seeing this holy ground for the first time. My surroundings look different from six miles in, from the lens of curious-writer-on-a-hike rather than uncomfortable-hiker-who-wants-to-be-writing.

From the edge of Plateau Point, I try to stand upright and take in the immensity of my new view – a 360-degree backdrop of vibrant rock, the Colorado River flowing miles below me, its blueish-green stream popping up from the tan rocks it weaves through – but my legs quiver from the work it took to get there. Six miles downhill is not the way our hikes usually begin. It is, however, what it takes for me to realize what makes the Grand Canyon so, well, grand.

That view carries me back up to the top, six miles of constant stair-stepping that’s about triple the Piestewa Peak hike we did a few weeks earlier. The three of us space out as we each grow more ambitious, then more tired, and more sore. When we think we’re close to the top, I see Kyle start running the rest of the way. I’m not far behind him, and I’m at a strong finishing pace. Each leg feels like it belongs to an elephant as I continue trudging step after step. But I feel strong, healthy, vibrant, and when I see Kyle cheering for me at the top, I’m filled with confidence. If I can do this, I can do anything. Maybe even finish writing a book.

There’s writing, and then there’s living a life worth writing about.

Michelle Chalkey is a Phoenix-based writer currently working on her first book, a collection of personal essays about her quest for confidence as an insecure twentysomething. Michelle’s work has been published in The Sunlight Press, The Mindful Word, Across the Margin, The Book of Hope Anthology, and Women’s Running Magazine. You can follow her on her website at michellechalkey.com, or keep up with her reading list on Instagram, @MichelleChalkeyWriter.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Gratitude

Gods That Sparkle in the Night

October 9, 2023
officer

I don’t know how long the highway patrol car had been following me, but when I glimpsed the flashing light in my rearview and heard the siren squawk, I switched off the music and pulled over. My heart raced. It was a late summer evening, the air thick and warm, but I felt cold; my teeth chattered. Nausea rose up and engulfed me, and I wondered if I would pass out. It had happened more than once over the last year, these attacks.

The patrol car parked behind me, filling my vehicle with light. An officer in a grey uniform and tall black leather boots strode over to my passenger side window. He bent down and beamed his flashlight in my face.

“Ma’am, are you aware that you were driving erratically?”

Just minutes before, I was tooling down this Northern California highway, wide open windows, music blasting. My fifty-year-old Mercedes had no official air conditioning, other than what I’d occasionally manage to jury-rig, namely Ziplock bags full of ice cubes tucked around my body, the intense cold delicious on my hot skin. There was to be no icy relief this night, and the sweat poured out and soaked my face and neck, trickling down my back, tickling my inner thighs. Everywhere felt itchy.

Despite the heat, I was happy to be on the road. I’d recently busted free from a three-year relationship that had allowed no space for forays, solitary or other. I still struggled to speak to people without lowering my eyes, a habit I’d learned so as to avoid appearing interested in other men.

The problem on this night began when I noticed my underwear chafing where crotch meets thigh. That morning I’d donned a skirt for strategic air flow, but the moment had arrived for the panties to come off. Besides, I was only a few miles from my new home. Who would know I’d gone commando, and who’d care? Now I could do as I liked. I kept my eyes on the road and steered with one hand as I shimmied my knickers below my hips, slid them down my legs, un-looped them over each foot before placing them on the passenger seat with a victorious flourish.

Relieved of constrictions, I was taken with the marvelous sensation of air upon skin. Stars sidled out and took their places in the darkening sky, beckoning me to leave the past behind and reorient myself in their direction. I tried to conjure the woman I was before she’d been compelled to go underground: she was curious, a jokester, someone willing to take chances. A woman who spoke freely without a second thought. She wasn’t one to duck-and-cover, to live in fear of the next outburst, the next flinging of her possessions into the street, the next haunted night. Now I could re-inhabit the old me. I could drive all night if I chose. Who’d stop me?

Just an officer who wanted to know why my car had strayed over the yellow line.

With a practiced effort, I steadied my voice. “I was just, oh, you know, taking off my underwear,” I said with a forced chuckle.

I motioned to the offending article on the seat and gave a sheepish shrug. “Wait until you hear this one,”  I pictured him telling the others back at the station. But the officer wouldn’t budge. Humor won’t help me here, I realized, a fact that always scares me.

“I’ll need to see your driver’s license.”

I froze. Had I brought it? For months I’d been skittish and absentminded, forgetting to turn off the stove, to lock the front door, to even eat or sleep. I’d also forgotten exactly why I was living with someone who could alternately love and terrorize with such skill that the swing from one to the other was as hypnotic as a pendulum.

I rummaged in my handbag, a jumbled mess. A jar of sparkly powder, the kind that women sometimes brush across their cheekbones and collarbones, had found its way into my bag. I’d never owned such a beauty product before. Maybe a previous girlfriend had left it behind in a rush and in my own rush to run away, I’d grabbed it by mistake. The lid had come off and the entire contents had spilled inside my bag, coating everything with a sheen.

I located my driver’s license, brushed it off and handed it to the officer. It was so thick with sparkly powder he couldn’t read it. He tried to rub it off and spread it all over his hands, muttering under his breath. Panic ricocheted through me like a pinball. I took deep breaths, methodically slowing my pulse down to the beat of mere dread. Over the past two years I’d learned to survive by keeping quiet, by doing as I was told, by playing dead.

“Any alcohol tonight, ma’am?” the officer asked.

“Only a beer,” I said. “Hours ago.”

“Are you sure about that?”

In one quick motion he thrust his whole torso through the window, into my car. I gasped and pulled back, expecting a blow.

“I want you to follow my finger with your eyes,” he said.

I locked my eyes on his finger as it swung back and forth, to and fro, the only thing that mattered in the world, shimmering with thousands of pinpoints of refracted light. For a moment I forgot where I was.

We’d take road trips to Nevada to buy fireworks. We’d stop at an old red barn in the middle of nowhere and buy all the mortars they had, stuffing the trunk. We’d drive back at night, crossing the state line on a dark highway lit by stars. We’d wait for the first rain, then I’d set off the mortars on a mountain top near his house, lighting each fuse with a rebel yell, and people in the valley below would hoot and holler and shoot their guns in the air. I could feel his smile in the dark as he watched my pleasure in the violent noise and the floral bursts. Fire-dahlias, we called them, back when he liked my wild ways.

The officer’s sparkle-covered finger had stopped moving.

I looked up into his face, just inches from mine. He had hazel eyes and slicked-back hair the color of an old penny, and pale, freckled skin. He stared back at me, motionless, as if deciding something. I could smell his sweat mixed with coffee and car exhaust, the scent of secret burdens. I’d always been drawn to a man’s pain, determined to hunt it down and carry it away like a hero, though in the end the trying would always leave my heart sore. Even now, I lit up from the lack of shared history between this stranger and I, the mystery yet unraveled. The corners of the officer’s mouth turned up ever so slightly, and I felt my body go limp. We are gods in one another’s lives: This, I know.

The officer pulled himself back through the passenger car window and recalibrated, then handed me my license.

“Be careful out there,” he said.

He waited for me to start my car and followed me for a while as I continued north on the highway, then he made a u-turn across the yellow line and headed in the opposite direction.

I pulled up to the curb next to my new home, a tiny hideout with a patio shaded by a magnolia tree. A string of lights hung from the branches, illuminating the path to my door. I called my home the Lily Pad. A good place to land. Next door lived a baby who was just learning to talk. “No, no, no, no, no,” he liked to say, his parents laughing at his newly-discovered ability. I had decided I would not be lonely here. I would court solitude like a gallant. I would explore how the air feels on my skin when I move through space in the ways that I alone would choose.

Melinda Misuraca’s work can be found in Hidden Compass, High Times, the Best Travel Writing series, Traveler’s Tales, Craftsmanship, Adirondack Review, Natural Bridge, Portland Review, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in California and the EU.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Self Care, Work/Life Balance

Hungry

October 7, 2023
boss

When I get the job at the literary agency, I am relieved. I am months away from turning 26 and being kicked off my parents’ healthcare plan. My current cobbled-together schedule of part-time and freelance work gives me neither insurance nor the amount of money I would need to purchase my own. The new job does not pay well, but I will get healthcare and overtime pay.

The salary is $32,000, but, my new boss says, “With the amount of work you’ll be doing, you can make $50,000 a year, easily.”

~~

On my first day of work, a steam pipe bursts and sends billowing clouds of unidentified smog around the neighborhood. Later, someone who lives in the area will tell me he bagged up and disposed of all the clothes he’d been wearing that day. I sit in the office, being trained by a departing assistant to answer the phones, use the filing system, and manage the mail until a firefighter comes up and tells us we need to go home.

~~

My boss does not live or work in New York City, and so every time somebody calls for her I have to transfer them to her cell phone. For the first few days, the transfers do not go the way she expects, and she screams at me over the phone, telling me to follow the directions in the guidebook the previous assistant left behind. This is the way I’m doing it, I tell her, on the verge of tears, but however I’m doing it is wrong. I place test calls using my cell phone and other phones in the office. Nobody else works in the office every day, so I need to do it myself, scurrying from phone to phone. It transpires that the desk phones have been switched, and the mechanism is slightly different than the instructions I’ve been given. I figure out how to do it.

Every time the phone rings, my stomach jumps into my throat.

~~

One day my subway stalls and I am fifteen minutes late. I miss a call from my boss, who immediately emails and texts me to see where I am. I start leaving my apartment at 8 AM so I can be at my desk by 8:30, giving me a buffer in case the trains are disrupted. I pick up a large iced coffee on the way, no breakfast.

~~

My boyfriend has been trying to get me into eating fish, and he makes a lovely meal of confit salmon over pasta that I cannot take a bite of.

“What do I do?” I ask. I am two weeks into the job and have cried every day.

He tells me to start looking for other work. Maybe it’ll get better, he says, but it doesn’t hurt to keep applying in the meantime.

It has taken me months to get this job. The idea of sending my resume out again, after ten- and twelve-hour days that leave me physically and emotionally exhausted, makes me feel ill. I stir the pasta around my plate and nod.

~~

My new healthcare does not cover my current therapist. She reduces her rate for me. These out-of-pocket costs and the money I still contribute to my useless health plan add up to almost half my salary. My parents pay for the therapy, and I feel small and guilty every time I write my therapist a check for the lowered fee.

~~

A main part of my job is reading submissions from authors to see if they are good fits for my boss to represent. Ostensibly, I could offer to represent any of them myself, but I have never sold a book to a publisher and cannot imagine when I would find time to do so. I am supposed to read all the submissions and forward them to my boss with a sentence or two explaining my take. I have always felt like taste is subjective, but I learn quickly that there are right and wrong answers. If I say a submission has “strong prose,” my boss will pull out sentences in her reply that she thinks are clunky and say, “Really? You think this is strong?”

I agonize over every word I write to her, and it takes me longer than she would like. I read on the subway on the way to work, on the iPad she has insisted on buying me for this purpose. I read on my lunch break, if I take one. If I’m meeting a friend for drinks at 8 or 9, I stay in the office until then, my eyes itchy against the blue light from my screen. I read on the train home and in bed before I go to sleep.

I can’t remember the last time I read a book for fun. When I see a book on shelves at the store or on my bedside table, I imagine all the sleepless nights of assistants behind its pages and have to look away.

~~

I can’t eat anymore, not like a normal person. My stomach is constantly roiling, and I don’t register being hungry, especially when I’m at the office. I make myself drink smoothies from expensive juice shops, packed with protein powder and nutrients. I eat saltine crackers with American cheese torn up in wonky slices on top. I eat handfuls of salted pistachios, cracking the brittle shells with snaps that feel more satisfying than the nut inside. Sometimes I eat half a bowl of soup before the texture starts to feel strange against my tongue and I throw it away.

~~

At Christmas, authors and publishing houses send us holiday gifts. I have to take pictures of each of them and send them to my boss, telling her who they’re from. Many of the gifts are candy or cookies, and other agents in the office will often leave their gifts out for people to snack on. My boss wants to regift hers to her daughter’s teachers, so I box them back up and send them on to her house.

One day, I mix up two brands of chocolate when I email her the rundown of the day’s gifts. I realize my mistake and correct myself, but she still calls me yelling, saying that I need to be more careful. If she thanked an author for the wrong gift, how would that make her look? I’m being thoughtless, and it’s reflecting badly on her.

After the call, I take a slow walk around the block, breathing in the sharp, cold air and trying to calm my racing heart. Tears freeze on my cheeks. When I get back to my desk, new emails from her are stacked at the top of my inbox.

~~

I edit manuscripts that her clients have written, and sometimes she gives me feedback on my work so positive that it feels like my entire body is glowing. I save these few emails in a separate folder, coming back to them after each scathing reply she sends me on other days. I don’t know why I want this praise so badly, why every email with a compliment in it feels like a long drink of cold water when I’m parched. These kind words are not frequent, but they come just often enough to make me think, Maybe I can do this job.

~~

I make a typo in adding a contact to our database, writing “Kathryn” instead of “Katherine,” and my boss emails me a message full of angry punctuation, asking where I got that spelling from.

It’s a mistake, I want to say, I made a mistake.

Every day, I make these small mistakes, my nerves frayed to the point that I barely register what I’m doing. Of course my emails have errors in them, of course I’m saving royalty statements to the wrong folders, of course I added a meeting to the calendar at the wrong time. It is not acceptable to my boss, which I suppose is fair—she has hired me to make her life easier, to do the work she doesn’t have time for, and because my anxiety is so high, I’m not getting better at it the longer I’m there.

One morning she calls me and asks why this keeps happening, how I keep letting things fall through the cracks. I take a shaky breath, say, “You make me very nervous,” and burst into tears.

She seems genuinely shocked, which I cannot fathom—this is not the first time I’ve cried on the phone with her, although I usually save it until right at the end, until the click of the receiver can obscure the first gasp of weeping, after which I speed-walk to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall, sobbing into my knees. This time, she apologizes profusely. She Venmos me $50 “for coffee” and tells me to take a break. I walk around the neighborhood. I wonder if it will get better after this.

~~

In the publishing world, the word “hungry” is thrown around a lot. A young, eager editor or agent might be described as “hungry,” which usually means they are willing to work long hours and attend endless networking meetings in order to get good submissions or new clients. People talking about their taste in books might say things like, “I’m hungry for a good domestic thriller,” as if ready to cut up the manuscript with a knife and fork.

~~

I have spent so long trying to gauge my boss’s taste, making recommendations and edits based on what I think she wants to see, that I have no idea what to tell people when they ask me what I’m hungry for. When I go to networking events, my mind feels smooth and blank. I can’t remember the names of books I’ve read, can’t express a preference for one sort of book over another. I pretend to have read everything my conversation partner mentions and tell them I’ll send them a submission when I have something I think they’ll like. I have nothing.

I sit across from these editors after work, at bars with good happy hours that are close to our offices, my one or two glasses of wine making my head swim dizzily. I can never remember if I’ve eaten that day.

~~

At these networking events, I listen to other agents and editors talk about the books they’ve represented or acquired. One editor talks about missing her stop on the subway because she was so engrossed in a manuscript. One agent says that over the weekend, she read an entire submission that moved her to tears. She was so affected by it she emailed the author at midnight on Sunday offering to represent her. It feels like a competition, like everyone is trying to outdo each other with their dedication and their emotional responses to their work. I wonder if these are true stories. I have never felt like this about a single manuscript I’ve read on submission.

As a child, I would stay up late reading, moving the book across a shaft of light my open bedroom door let in from the hallway. I would take five books out of the library and finish them all before the week was done. The bigger the book, the better. I craved the satisfaction of having more pages behind me than in front of me. Sometimes I would finish a book and immediately start it over, not ready to leave its world. I miss that feeling.

~~

I assist another agent, too, aside from my main boss, but he is mild-mannered and sweet and as such becomes less of a priority because I know he won’t yell at me if I’m late doing something for him. One of my tasks is to manage his inbox—he is older, not as tech-savvy, and so I wade through his incoming messages and flag anything important.

One day, I see an email in his inbox that just has my name as the subject line, from my other boss. My stomach drops as I click into it.

I read through the thread. They are talking about how I don’t work hard enough, about how I’m not dedicated to the job. “She never seems excited about anything I ask her to do,” one says. “I think that’s just her personality,” the other replies.

~~

When I tell my therapist about this, she tells me I need to quit. I know she’s right, and I cry with relief. I have been at this job for under nine months.

~~

When I call my boss to quit, she says, “How could you do this to me?” I nod through the conversation, apologizing, as she berates me, convinces me to stay a little longer by doubling my salary for the next few weeks. I have been applying to other jobs for months but so far have no new job to go to, so I agree, even though the idea of coming back to this dark, brown-carpeted office one more time makes me feel sick. When I hang up the phone, I go to the bathroom and throw up.

~~

My boyfriend has booked us a trip to Mexico for a few days. It’s a last-minute surprise, and we’re scheduled to go a week after my last official day at work. Two days after I leave my job, I get two new job offers and take one, which nearly doubles my salary and promises I can work 9-5.

In Cancun, I lie on the beach and read. I listen to the waves go in and out and pull the book into myself the way I used to when I was little, inhaling hundreds of pages in a single sitting. When I’m done, I feel full, not empty. The shadows start to lengthen on the sand. We go back to the hotel room, shower, and go to dinner. I can’t wait to eat.

Eliza Kirby is a writer and children’s editor based in New Jersey. She has been published in outlets like The Dodo, Podium, and the young adult writing community Figment. 

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Family

The Building of Something

October 4, 2023
Jax, apartment, building

I turned 21 on June 3rd and on June 8th we got married under a Southern live oak. We walked hand in hand at the end of our wedding night in between everyone that molded us, moved us, reared us to this. A few months after, we left north. When we left Texas for Pennsylvania, I never felt more sure home wasn’t in the South. Home, I thought, would only exist when we found a place we wanted to return.

We were friends, until one night at a bookstore we layed bare our similar dreams, revealing somewhere underneath our desire to escape. Eventually, we grew dependent on the stability we garnered together, falling in love while creating some sort of base. To what? We didn’t know.

A friend in college once threw up from heartache. Her partner of two years broke up with her over the phone while we were in the girl’s communal bathroom. She hung up, grabbed her stomach, and ran into a stall crying. She hurled liquid and loud wails in an attempt to extract the pain. Withdraws from something her body knew and craved. I always imagined that’s how I’d miss you.

…

In Pennsylvania, we found our apartment while driving through Pittsburgh’s Shadyside. We drove down Elmer, a street over from Walnut, the one with all the shops and restaurants, when I spotted a third-floor apartment with a sunroom that stuck out like a balcony. I dreamt of that sunroom quietly while we explored the neighborhood.

Down Walnut, we took a right on Negley, and a left on Elsworth where we drove alongside mansions. I imagined the ease of old money. I imagined us in the large grey victorian home with the blue swing hanging on a red maple. I imagined, for the first time in a long time, with a twinge of confidence; a belief in us.

When you called later, and they told us the sunroom apartment would come available during the month we needed it, it did something to my psyche, promoted an exaggerated optimism that simply leaving was the end of it, the solution to our past. I never considered leaving as temporary, as only an element of healing.

When we moved in, we gave most of our money to the restaurants on Walnut: margarita pizza at Mercurios Gelato & Pizza, the crab rangoons at Asian Fusion, the frozaccino at Coffee Tree Roasters, or the chocolate chip cookies at Rite Aid, just before midnight. On the weekends we ventured a few streets down to the underground French cafe with our favorite French toast for breakfast at noon; yours covered in syrup and walnuts, mine with strawberries and whipped cream. We witnessed our first real snowfall, the kind that insulated the city. Middle-of-the-night snowfall in Pittsburgh, void of any footprints, conceals a city once deindustrialized and makes it new.

…

We lived together for three years in Texas. First, in my childhood home after my parent’s divorce. My mom moved to Virginia and let us stay there for cheap, and, in exchange, we prepared the house to sell. I hated living in my childhood home; I felt stuck inside something I both loved and wanted to forget. The power of that contrast consumed me and so you worked hard to finish.

Later we moved into one of your mom’s rental houses. We didn’t pay any rent and we were roommates with your Aunt Nancy. Aunt Nancy and her pet bird, aside from the time she hit on my dad or the time she told us she liked listening to us laugh in the middle of the night, was a pleasant roommate.

When she moved out, your brother moved in and brought his three-month-old son, Jax.

Unable to afford daycare, he sat Jax on our bed that first morning and nearly every morning after until we left. I kept my eyes shut working to resist the weight next to me until his little hand brushed my face. I opened my eyes to his double chin hanging over me. I took note of the few hairs on his gigantic head, admired the eyelashes on his big brown eyes as he studied me, and in unison, we smirked at each other.

I closed my eyes and sank deeper into the blanket as he tugged.

When you got the call about the job in Pittsburgh and I got my college acceptance, we never hesitated. Getting out was the plan. We talked about adopting Jax only once, after the first time CPS got involved, but I recoiled at the thought of motherhood and secretly resented the way I loved him. We left north the day after Christmas, couldn’t even wait for the year to end.

…

There’s a picture your mom took on that Christmas Eve of me, Jax, and Jax’s mom. I had just changed Jax’s diaper, the last diaper of his I’d change for a long time. We were sitting on your mom’s red couch, his mom to my right and Jax on my lap. Jax and I are looking at a book together and his mom is looking at the camera. This image only stood out to me after her overdose. I imagined the picture in my head, I saw her body fading and only Jax and I were left.

…

The time between Christmas and New Year’s always feels unresolved. I sat on the passenger side of the U-Haul observing the town slowly creep behind us. The parks and restaurants that once faded to the backdrop of our life now stood out. My brain took a mental picture of a place I knew so well, a place I ached to leave, but a place now embedded with Jax’s short life; a foggy sense of obligation.

…

We walked like kids into our new sunroom apartment, entering a space we earned. I held the paper with the list of things to check off, and we scanned each room for imperfections, and though there were many, we found none. I dropped the paper and, with proper third-floor etiquette, forced you to pretend-jump with me.

Holding both your hands,

“We have our own apartment!”

and synchronizing to my repetitive sumo squat, you repeated the words from my mouth, “we have our own apartment!”

It took a couple of days for us to feel the relief of being miles from Texas. Settling into our new calm illuminated the reality of our previous chaos, the space Jax remained.

…

In this safe place we stayed, hearing news from home, your mom is now fostering Jax; parent’s rights legally terminated.

At what point, if at all, does our shield, the place we created for rest (rest existing as both essential and temporary), become hiding?

…

We watched families with fear and admiration, as though we were expecting. We did the math in our heads; your mom will turn 72 the year Jax turns 16.

We sat at the summit of Schenley Park hill, looking out above everything and silent together. Our limbs fixed to the bench, staring ahead.

“He’s already attached to my mom,” you said, not looking at me.

I veered my head further away,

“you’re right, he’s already attached to your mom,”

I said, repeating the words from your mouth.

Our words floated but never impeded my imagination. From then on whatever we did: eating pho in Squirrel Hill, grabbing a seat on the city bus, drinking taro bubble tea, reading in the sunroom, sitting still in Shenley Park; I imagined it all as existing in double, now and with a child.

…

We flew to Dallas one weekend to see a close friend, piling with other friends in her tiny sedan, staying out at rooftop bars, and eating 2:00 am ice cream. We slept on an air mattress in the living room she and her roommates shared. The next day in her car she asked us about Jax, “so are you guys going to end up adopting him?” she looked at me and I looked away. “Well, I don’t know, he’s really attached to his grandma.” I recognized the lie because of the rehearsed switfness of my answer. I looked down at my hands, opening them to release what I was holding on to. She watched me in silence, then put the car in drive.

I never anticipated the labor of the coming year. But in the car I knew; I never told you, this is when I opened my hands to a possibility; that home lay synonymous to a feeling I harbored for a person.

…

I fell ill to some sort of virus on the eve of my December graduation, exactly two years after we set off northeast. This was pre-pandemic, and I walked the stage with body aches. I see this now as a sort of birth, a morphing, the physical equivalent of a hammer to a nail, the building of something.

Aubrey Cofield is a daydreamer, over-thinker, emotional, human. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction but dabbles in a little bit of everything. Aubrey has been published in LatinX Literary Audio Magazine, NPRs Worth Repeating, Southern Review of Books, and The Motley Few, among others. She teaches creative writing to a wide age range; from 10 years old to 70 years old. Aubrey is currently working on a fiction manuscript that pushes through structural boundaries and is heavily based on personal life stories. She is a proud BIPOC writer and lives just north of Austin, TX.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Hunting for Joy

September 28, 2023
Joy Kitty

Years after we had all moved out and gotten married, my mom bought herself a kitten. A medium-length tabby with soft gray fur named Jazz. Completely smitten, my mother went 100 percent cat lady and quickly decided that Jazz needed a friend. Along came a shorter haired gray kitty named Joy. My mom went gaga over these cats. They have more toys than I ever did growing up. She pays the cat sitter an exorbitant amount of money if she ever has to leave them. She lavishes them with more affection than I ever received. I’ve given my mother framed prints of her grandchildren and she responds with a curt thank you, but when given pictures of her cats she completely lights up.

Now when I bring my own children to visit, Jazz and Joy mostly hide when my rambunctious crew shows up. Eventually Jazz makes her way out of the bedroom and begs for attention, and then completely ignores you in the assholey way that cats do. Joy, the more timid and moody feline, avoids being held or even seen. Jazz sits on my dad’s lap every morning and they watch Perry Mason together. Joy, only shows her face for tuna fish and my mom.

Growing up we had a cat or two and occasionally a dog. There was a short run with a snake, fancy fish tanks and even ducks in the pond. My favorite, an overweight, odd-looking calico named Mittens. Her face and body, blotches of orange and black but all four feet seemed to be dipped in perfect white paint.  I was fond of Mittens. She often slept on my bed but could just as easily be found in the yard stalking prey or wandering off for days at a time. There were no photos of our pets on the Christmas card. Pets were pets. They were reminders to feed and litter boxes to clean. If you were lucky, you could catch one long enough to snuggle.

I’m not completely sure when my mom crossed over from stressed to anxious, but the line has long been crossed. I remember her always working, cleaning or worrying but it has gotten progressively worse over the last several years. She keeps notes on all the doors to not let her kitties out, but I’ve never once seen either of these cats attempt to go outside. They probably don’t even know what grass feels like, but the idea of them running away terrifies my mother. These days, a lot seems to terrify her. Simple things, like a deleted junk email can send her over the edge.

When I visit I hate that I can expect to be woken up by the sound of the vacuum before the sun is up or my mom attempting to wash the sheets while I’m still snoring in them. Lately, it isn’t only the vacuum waking me but my mom calling for the cats long before dawn. Jazz usually turns up, but Joy always hides. My mom searches every room, regardless who is sleeping, turning on lights and looking under beds for Joy. It almost always results in tears.

“Where is my Joy kitty?”

“Help me find Joy?”

“Did you let her out?”

This is not a one- time occurrence. This is every visit. Every morning.  She will not relent until someone gets out of bed and looks behind dressers and in closets never opened. On a recent weekend trip home, my father boiled crawfish that we ate by the pound. My daughter insisted on taking the boat to her favorite island. My son caught dozens of perch off the dock. The weather, food and company could not have been better.  My kids, sunburned and content, had barely argued all day. I decided to reward them with snow cones and returned long after my parents usually go to bed. My children came in laughing with blue raspberry snow cone stained lips and I worried that I’d wake them.  To my surprise my mom waited up, like I was a teenager. She was not worried about us, but wanted to be certain that we did not let the cats out. We watched her check the front door multiple times to make sure it was locked and the oven three times to make sure it was turned off before finally going to bed. She walked upstairs and asked if we could leave the bathroom light on for the cats.

I said yes without asking any questions. My daughter puzzled by this behavior went quiet. Her smile gone, but she knew better than to ask why. She turned to me and you could read the worry on her twelve -year -old face.

“Mom, how do you not have anxiety?” she asked, but what she meant was,

“Will you be like this too? Will I?”

I told her that of course I have occasional anxiety. Just not to that extreme. I reminded her of tools we can use to help and rattled off several examples. My preteen just sighed. “I know how to breathe.”

I want to assure her in a hundred ways that I am not my mother. I want to point out all our differences. That I sing loudly in the car, that I laugh often, I rarely cry over emails and that I run the vacuum even less. The truth, however, is that sometimes I do worry, I will catch “it”, whatever “it” is. This crippling anxiety. This unpleasantness for life.

This complete lack of joy.

And right that moment, I hear my mom calling downstairs. She is close to tears, “ Here, Joy kitty, where are you?”

My mom, forever hunting for Joy.

Michelle Hurst is a writer and educator in Texas. Her favorite topics to write about are faith, chronic illness, hope, family relationships, and middle age. You can read more at www.michellewallishurst.com.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change