All Adither

No one says it better than Ira...

The Governor's Wife

Light drained from the sky and settled along the land, bringing a harsh chill. Cece buttoned up her marigold yellow sweater and threw on a down vest.

Most of the other reporters had gone home for the night, packing up the vans and rumbling back toward town. But Caroline stayed. You never knew what could happen at night.

It was a captivating story: the governor of Oklahoma had disappeared. He’d been gone for three days and his wife and aides hoped he was hiking in the Rockies–something he’d apparently done a lot of before. But it was clear they didn’t actually know where he was.

Such an important man. Vanished. Oddly, though she was staked outside the governor’s mansion waiting for a worried family member to emerge and give a statement, she felt pity for Fred Montgomery, the governor himself. What could be so bad, when you were a healthy man like that? Or what…what could be so good?

*

Belinda saw the tulips as hands, each petal a finger, that could hold a small glass sphere, an ice cube, a Robin’s egg. She’d watched, over the last few days, as the petals dropped one by one, falling to the striped damask tablecloth. And, in her mind, the sphere shattered, the ice cube melted, the egg cracked.

Fred had given her those purple tulips last Thursday, on the anniversary of their first date, an occasion she’d always demanded he recognize. She wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t a wedding anniversary enough for one man to remember? One man who wasn’t romantically inclined as it was. Or so she thought.

The emails she’d discovered had proven differently, had portrayed a man she’d only barely glimpsed 13 years before. He’d taken her for rides in his beat up Chevy Nova, had occasionally presented her with a handful of roadside flowers and had even, the summer they’d spent apart while she interned at Smith Barney and he was a page on the Senate floor, written her a few letters. His missives had been stilted (back then, he hadn’t grasped the concept of contracting two words), but sweet and earnest.

Still, he’d never sent her anything like those emails to Dezi.

Dezi.

The name pulled over her tongue like rancid orange juice and squeezed through her teeth. Such an abrasive name. Dezi.

And the words her husband had attached to that name. Soulmate (as if there were any such thing). Connection. From the first moment. Her stomach roiled just thinking of those phrases he’d given her. All saved in a Word document called “D”.

Belinda didn’t gather the petals as they dropped, but let them lie in rubbery curls. She didn’t take dinner at the table anyway. Not lately. She’d eat a quick hard-boiled egg over the sink or a granola bar in the back of the Towncar.

It was one of Fred’s staffers, Bernie Zusak, a man Belinda had always liked, who delivered the news on Sunday, while Belinda rode to a women’s luncheon to be held in the town library’s atrium. “Fred’s not hiking Flattop,” Bernie said. “Or Mount Richtofen either. As we’d hoped.”

Belinda’s first thought was that they’d found him dead somewhere–-his Saab lying upside down over the edge of an embankment, or a fatal gunshot wound through his flat abdomen, his body rotting in a weedy lot behind a gas station. He did, certainly, have his detractors.

She gripped her cell phone hard. “What?” she’d said that one word, severing the sunny afternoon into a distinct before and after. She’d been reading a book in the back of the car when he called. A good book she’d been sorry to put down. Not that she wasn’t wondering, every second, where Fred was. But this novel, about a cranky old woman and the small town that revolved around her, had been an escape.

“He’s in Brazil,” Bernie said.

Her stomach fell. Her brain turned to thick sludge and she couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Brazil? But he’d just been there last month on state business. Why had he gone back? And why hadn’t he told anyone? He’d been scheduled, that week, to be here, in the mansion with Belinda and the girls.

Shortly after the luncheon was over and she was home, she’d logged into Fred’s email accounts, his ok.gov, and both his personal addresses. She knew the passwords of course: Achieve. Achieve1. Achieve2. He believed in quotes, and his favorite was “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Robert F. Kennedy.

When they'd just started dating and Belinda had first seen the room he rented in a downtown Arlington house, she’d been surprised. Not by the lack of remotely tasteful décor-–he was a man in his twenties, after all-–but by the excessively tacky computer printouts pinned to his white walls. Ugly, thin paper with dot matrix quotes etched across them saying things like “Self-trust is the first secret of success” and “Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can”.

A little grandiose, she’d thought. But ambitious. Maybe for Christmas she’d have a few of his quotes printed in letterpress and framed. Something masculine, dark wood or black metal.

Back to the tulips. She'd let Doris, the housekeeper deal with them. Dump them into the compost.

On second thought, Belinda wanted the satisfaction herself. She yanked them from their crystal vase and carried all twenty-four flowers, stems dripping, petals falling, to the stainless steel bucket on the counter. She pushed them into the banana peels and coffee grounds so vehemently that eggshells scraped her knuckles and the heel of her hand squished into decaying food. She didn’t care. She crammed them down harder until the steel bin was bashing the granite countertop. She heard herself grunt. She didn’t care about that either. She pushed and slammed until compost littered the kitchen and the bin spun on its side in the middle of the floor.

“Well, then,” she said. She washed her hands and went to her bedroom to change her clothes.

*

He called at two o’clock in the morning which, even if they were in the same time zone, wasn’t that unusual. Fred only needed three or four hours of sleep a night and had always kept crazy hours. He was too focused or too inconsiderate to not pick up the phone the moment the thought to do so. This time, though, he didn’t sound revved up or bursting with ideas. He sounded tired. “Belly,” he said.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Not now.” She pulled herself half upright and clicked on her bedside lamp. Her heart tripped all over itself, like a thirteen-year-old boy trying to two-step.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? Carrying on with this Dezi woman? Betraying me and the girls and the whole state of Oklahoma who, by the way, assumed the worst for the past three days? For letting me think you were dead?”

“I just…needed some time.”

She was furious now and she couldn’t restrain her anger. “So you gave yourself permission to fly down to Brazil, lie to your family and your cabinet and your constituents, and have sex with some puta so you could clear your mind?”

“She’s a respectable woman, Belinda. You don’t even know her,” Fred said, his voice cracking ever so slightly.

“And neither should you.”

A silence descended between them, crashing down like a dropped piano. It sat there, hulking, impassable. Until finally… “I’m powerless,” Fred said. “I can’t explain it. Least of all to you, but, I couldn’t not come.”

Belinda considered pressing the hang up button. She laid her head back onto the pillow. She could smell peanut butter from the still open jar sitting on the nightstand. A thoroughly licked spoon laid there too and it repulsed her. When had she gone from preparing Pork Bolognese and Chicken Marsala to eating like a college student? “Well, you’re a weaker man than I thought you were,” she said. Her nose stung and tears gathered behind her eyes. She couldn’t cry. Not while on the phone with him.

“I take full responsibility for that. It’s true.” She could almost see his chin ticking upward as he spoke, convincing himself that still possessed some whit of dignity. She was sure he didn’t understand yet what he’d thrown away.

Fred had been one of the GOP’s top candidates for a 2012 run at the white house. But now. Now he was going down in a spitting fireball like John Edwards. “They’re going to eat you up, you know?” Belinda said, referring to the press.

“That remains to be seen. Can I count on your discretion?”

Belinda laughed. Cackled, really. And hung up. Can I count on your discretion? Please. She grabbed the jar of peanut butter, swirled her index finger through it and sucked, wishing she had chocolate chips to sprinkle in. She wondered, briefly, if Fred would be asked to step down. Not so much because of his extra-marital affair, but because he’d left Oklahoma without notifying anyone or assigning power to Lisa Knowles, the lieutenant governor. He wouldn’t give up his job willingly. She knew that.

Impeachment, perhaps? Then they’d have to move from the mansion, find a house in Nichols Hills.

Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t going to move in with Dezi.

*

The coffee tasted good that morning. Hotter, more bitter, more rich than usual. Still in her bathrobe, she took it to the window as she often did, planning to check the Scissor-tailed flycatcher’s nest in the redbud tree. As she pulled open the drapes though, and peeked through the sheers, she saw what she, at first, thought was a block party. Before she had time to wonder why a block party was happening at seven in the morning, she realized that what she was seeing was no block party. But a swarming blanket of reporters and cameras in the street, some encroaching onto the lawn. Vans with satellites parked along the curb. She ducked away from the window and stepped back into the shadows of the ficus. She set her coffee on top of the piano and paced into the kitchen, then back. What the hell? What the hell?

She’d expected maybe a few calls from the Oklahoman and the local network affiliates. Maybe, maybe a brief mention by Brian Williams. But not this…herd of story-hungry mongrels in her front yard.

Bernie would know what to do. She called him, sure he’d be up, feeding his dog Chester, reading his three favorite newspapers and drinking tomato juice with freshly-ground black pepper.

“Shit. Damn Jackasses,” was how he responded when she told him about the press outside. Despite the situation, she laughed. Bernie was the only one she knew who could compose an entire sentence made exclusively of curse words. His were inspired.

Fred sometimes laughed politely when he let loose a slew of expletives, but later muttered how low class it made Bernie sound. “He’s better than that,” Fred had said more than once.

Belinda, though, delighted in Bernie’s language. He made the most boring, cardboard, state issues entertaining.

She heard him sip his tomato juice and exhale loudly, as if he’d just downed an entire can of Coke. “Well,” he said. “The first thing you should do is close your goddamn drapes.”

Belinda said, “They’re closed.”

When his cigar-lit voice said, “Good girl,” her shoulders loosened a little.

“Next thing,” he said. “Don’t answer your door and don’t answer your phone for those assclowns.”

“Right.”

“I’ll give them some generic statement they can release and hopefully ease ‘em off your back.”

“That’s not going to work, Bernie. And you know it. They want shots of the jilted wife. And words too,” Belinda said, peeking through the sheers again.

“Well, are you willing to give them that?” he asked. “Maybe step out on your porch with a handful of tissues and unwashed hair?”

She laughed again. “Point taken.” Just then, Katie came into the living room eating from a bowl of dry granola. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and said, “What going on?” Belinda wanted to shield her from all this, to usher her back up to her turquoise bedroom strewn with iPods and knitting projects and books. But she’d find out sooner or later anyway, would have to know that she couldn’t hang out with her friends that afternoon.

She motioned for her to look out the window. Katie stared for a long time, then stepped back as if someone had flicked her with a fly swatter. Another sort of teenager might’ve enjoyed the idea of paparazzi outside her house, but Katie had grown up wary of reporters and how they can twist your words to suit their stories. “It’s because of dad,” she said. “It’s because of dad.”

“Poor child,” Bernie said. “I could just punch Fred in the motherfucking nose right now.”

Belinda said. “I could, too.”

Just then the doorbell rang. The room stiffened, the furniture and framed pictures petrifying. “Just breathe,” Bernie said. “And go enjoy your coffee. Take a bath. What the fuck ever. Just don’t, do not, give them a single word until I can phone something in. And, if you want to preserve your sanity, not even then.”

*

Belinda didn’t hear him slip through the kitchen door or creep up the heavily carpeted stairs. She didn’t, in fact, know he was there until she heard the bathroom faucet running. “Madison?” she asked, thinking her younger daughter was washing her plastic ponies or giving her Barbies a bath.

She came around the corner and saw him, his face red and dripping. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey?”

With a thick ivory towel, he patted his features, soft around the edges now. Belinda looked at him. She was aware that for 50-ish, he was a handsome man. A powerful man. But she also knew he used store-bought dandruff shampoo and had to shave with an electric razor or he’d burn his sensitive skin. She was familiar with how the bedroom smelled after he’d slept in it and that his top lip flattened when he was angry.

Knowing these things, she couldn’t imagine how a woman might be so recklessly in love with him. Or, in love with what she thought she knew of him, Belinda reminded herself. “How’d you get in here?” she asked. “Past the vultures.”

“I came through the Kennelly’s yard. On foot.” he pointed his electric razor toward the front yard. “They are looking for a black SUV.” He said smugly. He clicked on the razor and its high-pitched buzz filled the bathroom, echoed off the walls.

When Belinda turned, she saw his still-packed garment bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door. She flinched. She had the urge to walk up to it and sniff it, but, instead, she left the room.

Sometime later she heard his office door close and he stayed there for the rest of the day. Just before dinner, Bernie called, “Things have changed,” he said. “You have to talk to the bastards. Are they still out there?”

“Mostly,” she said. A few had strayed off. She’d seen a little news footage that day of reporters standing in front of her house, spouting what they knew, which was very little. She tried not to watch TV, but the internet, the damn internet, whenever she signed on to check her email or do a little work, she couldn’t resist clicking the headlines that pertained to Fred and her and her girls. She squeezed her eyes closed. “Why do I have to talk to them?”

“People think you should. People want to hear from you, Belinda. You’re the first lady of this state and the wife of a GOP up-and-comer, or former up-and-comer.”

“Have you talked to Fred?”

“About an hour ago. Chewed his pansy ass out.”

“Okay,” Belinda said. “But I’m going to say what I want to say. I’m not taking dictation from you Bernie.” There was silence on the other end. Finally, Bernie sighed and said, “You’re a reasonable woman. I trust you won’t spout anything too vitriolic.”

“Of course not,” she said.

As they hung up, she was already constructing the sentences in her mind. It would be a relief, actually, to put something out there. To take a little control. She sat down at the small, wooden desk in the alcove off the kitchen and began typing on the laptop.

“What are you writing?” Fred asked, sidling up to her, a can of cashews in one hand.

“My statement.” She could smell cipollinis and tomatoes roasting in the oven. She'd finally made an effort with food again. It was then that he grabbed one of the upholstered black leather chairs and sat across from her.

She was struck, suddenly, by a memory of their first house. A bungalow in Wheaton (another DC suburb), with creaky Adirondacks in the living room and framed posters on the walls. She missed it. She missed the simplicity. “Belinda,” he said, popping nuts into his mouth. “We need to talk.”

Her fingers, resting on the plastic keys, started trembling. They did need to talk. She laid her hands in her lap and swiveled so she faced him.

“I know I’ve hurt you. I know that. And I’m truly sorry you’re upset.”

“And the girls,” Belinda said between clenched teeth. “Don’t forget how you’ve hurt Katie and Lindsey.”

“I’d never forget about Katie and Lindsey,” he said.

“And how you’ve hurt them.”

His eyes lowered, then raised to meet Belinda’s. They used to be green. Green as new spring leaves. But they’d faded over the years and now looked more like a freshwater lake on a cloudy day. Colorless.

“They’re resilient girls,” he said. Belinda hated it, despised it, when people used that catch-phrase “kids are resilient” to justify away their poor behavior. Yes, Katie and Lindsey were resilient. But they were not unbreakable.

“You think that excuses you?” she said. She remembered, inexplicably, the tulips, their petal-fingers wilting and falling off. “I told you, Fred. I told you that I couldn’t abide your going down there. That this is not a three-way marriage. And yet you did. And you’ve made a huge mess here. And I’d like to know how you’re going to clean it up. The Oklahoman has copies of your emails, you know.”

His upper lip did that thing, where it pressed to his teeth and slid slowly up and down when he spoke. “Did you forward them?”

She picked at a spot of dried food on the keyboard. Should she tell him what she knew? “Half of them were sent from your work account,” she informed him. “State property. Anyone with a little computer savvy could get their hands on those.”

“How do you know only half of them were sent from my work account?” he snapped.

“Because I snooped, okay? My so-called husband and the so-called governor of Oklahoma went missing for three days. I was looking for clues. I was trying to figure out if we should launch an investigation into your disappearance, Fred.” She hadn’t set an investigation in motion though. She’d known all along she wouldn’t. She’d known that there was a Dezi. Not her name or where she lived or that Fred considered this woman his soul mate, but Belinda had been aware that some silvery, vapory presence out there had captured his imagination in a way she herself never had.

Belinda and Fred, when they’d decided to get engaged, were good friends, came from similar backgrounds (both had lawyer mothers and fathers with sketchy heart health) and had the same corny, dry sense of humor. But there’d never been that flash or sizzle between them. Never what you’d call, infatuation or, she supposed, giddy love.

Fred stood and strode into the bowels of the kitchen, bracing himself on the counter’s edge. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

She got up, too. “Yeah, well, I wish you hadn’t gotten wrapped up with this woman. With this escape…you know that’s what this is, don’t you? It’s an escape. I’d love to have an escape too. Someone 5,000 miles away who I could email when I start worrying too much about the girls or after I’ve been in the office for twelve hours or when you and I aren’t getting along.”

Through gritted teeth he said, “She’s more than an escape, Belly. She’s…she’s part of me.”

Belinda winced. She knew he was full of shit. It was so easy to think the best about someone with whom you never had to replace a faucet or raise children or argue about Oklahoma’s economy. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. At the sunken lights, like small, gray plantars warts. “We never should’ve done this. We should’ve bought a motel like your cousin Manny, run that together instead of a whole damn state.”

Fred looked at her as if she’d just announced she was going to run outside and moon the press. “This is what I’m cut out for,” he said. “We’re completely different people than Manny and that wife of his.”

“Yes, we are. They’re faithful to each other.” As far as she knew, but she wasn’t going to add that caveat. There were several moments of silence during which Belinda wondered when the girls would find Fred was home and what else to make for dinner and noticed how the skin around her husband's eyes hung like hammocks.

Finally, he said, “What are you going to do?”

“Do you mean am I going to leave or stay?”

“In so many words,” he said. “Yes.”

She wanted to tell him she would stay. And that if he wanted any hope of salvaging his political career, he’d have to stay too. But, dear God, she couldn’t. Knowing what she knew: that he was so beyond smitten with a Brazilian woman named Dezi, that he would inevitably see her again, that he so lacked respect for Belinda that he’d leave without telling her where he was going or when he might come back, to make love on the beach to this other woman…she couldn’t stay. What message would that send to her girls? That marital vows only applied to women? No. No. She, Katie and Lindsey would move out of the mansion, with its dark wood and dark hallways. She hated its boxy lines anyway. She would miss only the bright kitchen.

The girls, of course, would hate to go, would miss their rooms. She’d have to promise them new furniture or something, flat-screen TVs. A bathroom just for Katie. A window seat for Lindsey. To Fred, she said, “I’ll go, of course.”

He dropped his grip on the countertop and his shoulders sagged. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or distraught.

“What do you think Oklahomans would think of a Brazilian First Lady?”

He shook his head and wiped his baggy eyes.

She left the kitchen then. She yanked a fistful of curtain back from the front window. There were still twenty or thirty of them milling around, drinking coffee from paper cups, chatting, sitting cross-legged on the grass and typing on laptops. She almost laughed, imagining herself taking them a platter full of cookies, opening dusty lawn chairs and jotting Fred’s cell phone number on Post-Its and passing them out.

She thought how Bernie would kill her if she emerged onto the front porch and offered the journalists the bare truth, laid it out for them like a huge picnic on her front lawn. Or, on the Governor’s front lawn. Soon, she’d be somewhere else with different grass and a different title: Former First Lady? Jilted First Lady? Pathetic Ex First Lady? Belinda supposed those were all better than First Lady Who Condones.

There was one reporter, in particular. A woman wearing a gold sweater. She stood not near a white van with a satellite dish on top, but alone with a camera. She was thin, her dirty-blond hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. And she stared at the window where Belinda stood.

Belinda doubted the woman could see in, with the distance and reflections, but, just in case, she took a step back.

The woman, though, continued to gaze at her. To gaze into her. Her arms crossed under her breasts, a notepad dangling from one hand. Belinda itched to pound on the window and shoo her away. Or to stay there, eyes seemingly locked, visually conveying everything that was inside her, everything that could never come out.

She started to think about logistics, about how a moving truck would be able to snake through the vans and reporters and carry her things back out. She thought about how she’d tell the girls what she knew about their dad. She heard Fred’s cell phone trill from the kitchen and her heart stopped.

Without being able to decipher his words when he answered, she knew by the way his voice dipped and looped that it was her. Dezi.

Striding across the parlor and up into her bedroom (because she thought of it as hers now, not theirs), she called Bernie and said, “Come over here please. There’s a reporter I like and I’m ready to talk.”

We are all made up of stardust

I ran across an NPR story earlier this week about a pastor who realized she was an athiest, but continued to "serve" as a minister. As each Sunday approached and she knew she'd have to give a sermon she didn't believe, she'd get stomachaches and headaches and endure all sorts of miserable physical manifestations.

Reading the story, I felt for her. I think we've all probably tried to pretend to be something we weren't and suffered as a result. (In my case, it was an brief engagement to an overbearing man that, after a few months, caused my gut to seize and pounds to slide away like melting wax.)

I also related to her doubts about her faith that morphed into full blown disbelief in any higher power.

Not that I've ever had faith in a God, per se. But I would say that, since college, when four family members died in a very short space of time, I've been on a sort of spiritual quest.

I don't believe there is any cause and effect in praying to an entity to save us money on car repairs or make a sick loved one healthy.

How can there be? Why would God save one privileged American while millions of others around the world starve? No, that's arrogance, in my opinion.

But I do believe in energy, positive and negative. The universe swirls with it, with us, and when we die, we become cosmic dust, are eventually incorporated into stars. Which is comforting in it's own way. Not as soothing, as, say, believing that we'll be enveloped into heaven where purring cats are everywhere and we can eat cake all day without getting fat. But, it helps.

My father-in-law was a methodist minister, and when he was alive, I asked him what he thought about God.

I never got a straight answer. When I questioned him about his beliefs regarding afterlife, this man educated at Yale seminary said, "How can heaven hold so many people?"

Even I know that, assuming heaven exists, there are no bodies there, only souls. Souls so slight they might shimmer like thin silver filaments. I found his answer odd. And could never get him to commit to saying that Yes, he believed in God.

His wife, my mother-in-law, was a little more forthcoming. Despite her overtly-religious Christmas cards and attendance of church every Sunday, she sent me a Word document outlining that she believes not in a white-bearded man, but that God equals Love.

Anyway, this pastor on NPR who has come out as an athiest, it struck me. That's all really. I feel badly for her that she felt she had to pretend for so long and now is unemployed. But I'm glad she's being true to herself.

Hopefully it'll cheer her a bit to know that someday she'll be part of a brightly burning celestial body.

 

Home

We just got back from Arizona yesterday, where we met up with my parents on the kids' spring break. There were idyllic moments. There were times when the tension between J. and me squealed like a too-tight violin string. Mostly there are sweet memories, though.

I know I'm lucky to have experienced such a trip. Such trips.

I married a traveler, you see. And my own (somewhat restrained) wanderlust had been latent until I met J. and we started to go places.

I'm planning a solo trip to China in October (perhaps I've mentioned that--I'm a little excited) to reconnect with my college roommate and best friend from those years. How fortunate! Such bounty of experience I'm accruing.

But it does take work. The planning and packing and childcare arranging.

Yesterday, after pulling into our driveway and dragging the suitcases inside, I fell catatonic and was barely able to lift clothes to hangers, toss laundry into machines. I was so tired I couldn't drink! Not even one glass of wine.

I sipped tea and went to bed. Though I stayed awake 'til midnight reading.

At 6:40, Claire called me and was shaken and teary. Another nightmare. I laid down next to her until she calmed. Then staggered back to bed where J. let me stay until 9:30(!)

Today, the kids played outside with neighbors all afternoon. Fabulous!

Meanwhile, I whipped in circles like a weathervane in a hurricane. Undone projects everywhere, most of them on my computer. Finish the photo book for Claire's class! Work on the posters for the school fundraiser! Send promised copies of Spectacle to readers on LibraryThing! Go over the manuscript again before uploading the next revision to Amazon! Format for hard copies even though the CreateSpace instructions are vexing and Lightning Source makes me want to shove my head in the coffeepot! Log onto work and catch up!

We live on a fairly quiet street, but cars do pass by, some of them not so slowly. Still, I let Max and Claire play there with the 11 and 13 year-old boys next door. They are watchful, but kids. I was uneasy. I was also trying to get things done.

I made corndogs for lunch and thought, None of this accomplishment will mean a damn thing if I hear the screech of brakes and the yell of kids and one of them is left broken on the asphalt. I think about how, in the 70s, I used to ride my bike all over the neighborhood without my parents knowing where I was.

I predict I will writhe around in bed tonight, worst-case scenarios flickering through my brain.

Beyond the margins of sanity

Sonya banged the Honda's dash, trying to restart the heater. It was temperamental--sometimes spurting out warm air at a red light or as the car swung around a wide corner, but never producing with any regularity.

Before she pulled up in front of the two-story, chocolate brown house, she killed the headlights. The car rolled forward quietly. Darkly.

Shivering, she parked and looked at the west-facing upstairs window. Yellow light glowed behind cheap, metal blinds. She remembered the blinds rattling as the cats dove through them.

Leaning forward, the vinyl seat groaning, Sonya squinted up, hoping for a shadow, a sign, beyond the light –-which she knew to be an eighties torchiere--of life.

She could sit there for hours staring (and had), her heart galloping at the slightest flicker of movement. It was easy, somehow, to forget the last five months and focus only on the other two. The first two. The ones in which they fell in love: his sparkling eyes, that hand brushing hers as he gave her a paper cup of coffee, and the sweet promise of possibility every morning of those eight weeks.

They had met on the train, the rail that ran between Portland and Seattle. Sonya had been on her way home from her aunt Annabelle's funeral and he was returning from a three-month backpacking trip through the Sierras. Chatting in Car 11, only a plastic armrest between them, they found they both liked rice milk on their cereal and that their favorite flower was ranunculus, and she willed him, actually sat there and telepathically begged him, to kiss her.

He didn't, not until they met up at an Irish pub in Belltown a week later.

And now, as she listened to the ticking of her engine and the occasional, distant siren, that first kiss, those firsts, were all she wanted to think about.

She couldn't let go.

She had a history of not letting go. Of dragging relationships and jobs and apartments beyond the margins of sanity.

Sometimes she thought of old boyfriends and the sales accounts she kept at the organic food company where she worked and spaces in which she'd lived, as stretched, dirty rubberbands that she'd yanked and fiddled with too many times. Occasionally the rubberbands snapped, stinging her with firings, hushed reprimands, or even restraining orders.

Sonya didn't mean to push things so far. She just didn't understand how to do it: to release what she cared about like great, flapping birds that would fly up into the clouds never to be seen again.

What gave other people the strength to move on when they'd fallen in love, for God's sake? When they'd wrapped the soft strands of someone's hair around their knuckles and stared watery eyes into watery eyes professing eternal devotion?

Or after they'd worked sixteen hour days for a client, believing and promoting? Or made a home in the musty corner of a 30-year-old building with no water pressure, fluffing bedding and cooking roasts and lighting candles? How did you just shut that off and not give a shit anymore?

She couldn't. So she sat and stared at the window, the one, blank, lit eye that gave her nothing, really. No love, no financial reward, no home.

Still, she would not stop, because somehow, when she gazed at that window, she could convince herself that the arguments and accusations of her "smothering" him had never happened. That, in some small way, he was still hers.

Glass shattered, interrupting her mental rationalizations.

What the hell? She jumped.

The window hung in shards, the blinds clanking. She had no idea what had caused the crash, but blinked as she watched one of the cats--Peggy, she thought--squeeze through and pick her way across the steep roof. She was clawless and not allowed to leave the house.

Then she saw him, lifting the broken window and leaning outside it. 

She could hear his voice, just barely, calling to his favorite cat. He disappeared, then came back and held something toward her.

Peggy glanced at him, but continued exploring.

He stretched one leg through the gaping window frame, then another. In a moment, he was creeping across the shingles, leading with his hand that held the treat.

Sonya sat straight up, holding her breath.

His foot slipped. He scrabbled and righted himself.

Peggy stopped, sat, and licked her front paw.

Sonya was dying to hop out of the car and help. She knew he just needed to hold back a little, let Peggy come to him. If he pursued her, she'd continue to skitter onward.

But he'd never been good at listening to Sonya's sibylline messages.

"C'mon kitty, kitty. Peggy, c'mere girl!"

Sonya hissed, "Don't chase her!" But it was for nothing. He couldn't hear her.

Then, as if he were the road runner, with legs whirring around so fast they blurred, he lost his footing and slipped.

Shirt, denim, skin, and shoe soles scraped down the gravelly roof, until half his body hung over the gutter, legs dangling.

Sonya grabbed the door handle, then stopped. What would she do? She could fetch the ladder she knew he kept in his garage, she supposed. But then he'd know she'd been there watching, had been there many nights.

If she hadn't used up her cell phone battery making frantic sales calls, she'd dial 9-1-1.

She relaxed for a moment, thinking she'd sit there and see if he could save himself.

But then, no. I need him walking this earth, she decided. I need him alive.

Jumping from her car, heels clicking across asphalt, she plunged into the darkness of his damp garage, found the aluminum ladder and, with a strength she didn't know she possessed, hoisted it off its hooks. She carried it to the front of the house and propped it against the roof.

Then she started to run, click-clack, click-clack. She dove for the safety of her car just as he called, "Sonya! Jesus!"

She turned over the ignition, banged the dash to get the heater working, and tore away from the curb.

It was time to go anyway, she told herself. Time to hole up in her one-bedroom apartment where she'd light a few candles, sauté some chicken and potatoes and go through color chips, trying to decide whether to paint her living room sandstone beige or oyster taupe.

Sonya suspected there would be an angry email later. He'd copy and paste the paragraph he had sent before, saying he'd moved on and she should, too. That she was pathetic and needed to get herself a hobby.

Yeah, what she wouldn't give to be enamored by knitting or hard core into bouldering. Reading, even. But she hadn't fallen head over heels for any pastimes. 

Someday, she thought, maybe a TV show would hold her interest and she'd wait breathlessly for it to come on every week, Googling the actors, and joining online forums discussing the storylines.

For now, though, it was this apartment and her work and him.

That was all.

Poisoned

I come in through the sliding doors of the rambling retirement community and a woman I recognize from the dining room looks at me blandly. "Help. Help. She's trying to poison me," she says of a nurse who stands nearby.

The nurse rolls her eyes. "This is more than I can take," she snaps and storms away.

The paranoid old lady, hair violently thinning, grips her walker and stands. "I don't know what's going on here. This is a scary place."

She makes these dramatic accusations as calmly as if she's instructing her Yorkie to go outside and do his business. There are no exclamation points.

Cued by the nurse that this woman is not to be taken seriously, I am already a flight up the stairwell.

It is a little scary, if you consider old and impending death frightening.

Or maybe, more than perilous, it is lifeless, which is just as terrifying.

Despite the glorious San Diego sun, heavy drapes hang at every window like arms clad in fur pelts. The thickly carpeted hallways smell powdery and musty. They are utterly silent, with only the occasional tread of a pair of SAS shoes and oiled walker wheels passing by. 

Behind every apartment door a life ebbs, having been downsized from houses filled with furniture and children and pets with yards and gardens and fruit trees, to one-bedroom spaces fitted with basics – wall hugging chairs and loveseats instead of overstuffed recliners and sofas. A few pots of geraniums on a balcony replacing a sprawling vegetable patch and tractor barn.

Instead of garages bulging with tools and lawn mowers, there are barren carports. And Keurigs sit in the lobby where coffee and tea burbles into styrofoam cups rather than a glinting percolator in a bright yellow kitchen.

The food in the dining room floats in several inches of cream, with fruit-laden Jello and soggy prunes a staple in the salad bar. There are some good rolls, though, and a grill where you can order waffles and cheeseburgers.

Men come up to me in the dining room to measure their height against mine. "I used to be six-two!" they crow. I try not to curl my lip and snap, "This is more than I can take!"

Instead, because J.'s mom lives here and because these men are old, I try to humor them by idiotically nodding and smiling. Still, I can't help but think of Michigan State college boys and how, at parties, they stood on their tiptoes when I walked by.

These men are the same, just on the other side of life.

The staff is large and generally kind and everything is clean.

Max and Claire love it here: the two swimming pools and the fifth-floor Wii and the games and puzzles their grandma supplies them with.

They're not fazed by spotted 80 and 90-year-olds, not spooked like J. or overly contemplative and quiet like me. They're just kids with clear, glowing skin, inexhaustible energy, and acceptance of the different shapes and sizes and ages of the humans all around them.

And, though I'm very much sure the woman who feared she was being poisoned was not, I do wonder about her childhood and middle age and dementia that has her by its ragged claws.

J. and I reassure ourselves: we'll never live in a place like this that smells like cold cream and scrambled eggs, where our neighbors drop dead weekly. We'll be somewhere bright and airy, with a view of the ocean and private nurses (or children) to care for us.

But yeah, who knows? In the same situation, in a place that is overly-upholstered and silent, I might accuse someone of slipping arsenic into my orange juice if it will get me out.

Parallels

Lately, when Max decides (in a persnickety, cat-like way) that he's ready for a little affection, he'll come and hug me.

Delighted, because these moments are increasingly rare, I'll throw my arms around him and hold onto his hard, angular boy body.

It often ends with him shaking me off and snapping, "Get away from me, weirdo."

Author Meg Wolitzer totally gets what it's like to mother a boy. I'm reading The Ten-Year Nap right now, and the way she writes about boys around the ages of 9 or 10 is genius. Her narrative is filled with the nuances of raising a male creature with their growing remove and surging testosterone.

"I wonder if the boys learn a particular kind of maleness at school...A Lord of the Flies kind of thing. I know their aggression is held in check, but I feel like it's still there, like I can almost see it."

Max is not even the most boyish boy. He tends to be observant and scientific rather than rough. He is more the kid from Jerry Maguire who constantly quotes, "Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?" than boys who stomp and squash and barrel.

Still, though, I'm sensing the impending distance. It lurks behind the trees like a hazy, pink sunrise.

***

So...Spectacle. In it, I write about a gym teacher who is despised by the two protagonists, Emily and Trix. Though, in the novel I changed the gym teacher's name and physical characteristics, she is, largely, based on my real middle school/high school gym teacher. A few of the scenes in the novel very much parallel my real life experiences.

Silly me, I never thought my ex-gym teacher would ever read my story aimed at 16-year-olds. Through the magic of Facebook, however, I learned that she has downloaded it.

Though I'd love for her to rethink some of the ways in which she "taught" us and favored certain students to the detriment of the rest of us, she's retired now and is, from what I have heard, a decent person and a constant in the community in which I grew up.

I'm an idiot. I hope I don't hurt her feelings too much and that she doesn't contact me.

In other Spectacle news, my little story hit the top 25 on Amazon's free Kindle books today! Mostly thanks to Pixel of Ink. Holla, P-O-I, and thank you for the shout out. It was a fun day watching the numbers go up.

Back to reality tomorrow when I hang the $2.99 price tag on Spectacle again.

***

Max and I have been watching the stats together, high-fiving a lot. Today I picked him up from unicycling club after school and could hardly wait to tell him: 4,500 downloads since I saw him last. He wore his hairnet still, the thing that protects him from catching lice from the community helmets, and had ballpoint pen scrawled across his smooth, soft forehead. "Wow," he said. "That's a lot."

He was caught there, between little boy and big boy, between looking ridiculous and not caring and grinning with me over Amazon rankings.

And I thought, God, I love this. I love this age and this moment and that I can appreciate it all.

My YA novel Spectacle is alive!

I've been so remiss in posting to my blog because I've been working my tail off trying to get Spectacle edited, proofread, edited some more, formatted, etc. But it's up now! I sort of feel like I've given birth. Except I'm not spiking a fever or vomiting and I actually feel good enough to pop a bottle of bubbly. Not that I have, mind you. But I could.

Anyway, it's here on Amazon and I'd so appreciate it if anyone wants to buy it and read it and review it. It's an e-book only, so it requires a Kindle or Kindle app on your computer, phone, or tablet. Someday soon I'll probably put it up on Barnes and Noble as well, so it'll be available for the Nook.

Another thing you should know, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time: the fiction I normally post here is adult fiction. Spectacle, however, is YA. Meant for girls 15 or 16 and older. It has some mature content. Swearing (though no Fucks anywhere), some kissing, groping, and implied sex. I think it's realistic without being over the top. But then, I wrote it.

If you do read it and think it's decent, please, pretty please with candy hearts on top, post a review on Amazon. It means so much and helps immensely with sales.

That is all. Thank you for your support! Beyond words...

Updates!

You might recall that back in May I wrote about my endometrial ablation. Endometrial ablation is when a woman is put under general anesthesia for a half hour, given a D&C, and the lining of her uterus is scorched out. The purpose is to stop or greatly lessen the monthly bloodbath.

A few of you asked me to report my results. The results? They are freaking sweet.

I can leave the house whenever I want now! I no longer feel flu-ish for 72 hours out of every 24 days. In fact, besides the spazzy irritability that hits once a month (yeah, that doesn't go away), I barely notice when it's that time.

Seriously. Novasure is the best invention since PopTarts and I will be happy to answer questions anyone may have.

***

Claire learned to tie bows last week. She worked and worked until she got it. So, Saturday, we went and bought her lace-up shoes, size 2. She's extremely proud of herself and I'm proud of her, too. Mostly because she's a persistent girl who doesn't give up easily. If there's one thing I most admire in a person, aside from kindness and innate talent, it's tenacity. Tenacious C. will do well. Go on, my girl. Tie shoes! Yank out loose teeth! Learn to ice skate! Get back up on that bike! Study hard! Find love! Pursue your passions!

***

I have finally finally finally made the decision to publish my YA novel Spectacle as an ebook. It took me forever to come around. I've done a lot of research, talked to people in the biz, read this blog until my eyes crossed, and realized that epublishing is the future. I don't know exactly how the industry will pan out or how my little book will do. But it's clear I can't ignore this opportunity. I'm excited! I love the idea of control. I get to design and choose the cover. I get to say what parts of the story stay and what goes, I get to price it and keep 70% of the royalties (assuming someone besides my mom and sister buy Spectacle).

It's the first time in a long, long while that I've felt sparkly instead of discouraged when I think about my writing.

I'll let you know when it's up on Amazon. My team of beta readers, editors, and designers are working on it as we speak (which means my online buddy Kristy, my proofreading friend Betsy, and an outfit I'm hiring for $50 to format my manuscript). I would love whatever support you can give me once it's released. Kind words. Shares on Facebook. Tweets. Anything you can do.

More to come...

Maurice Sendak on Fresh Air – If this doesn't do it for you, I don't know what will

I drove downtown tonight to meet my friend for drinks and apps. On the way, I listened to what was, perhaps, the most moving interview I've ever heard. It was Terry Gross from Fresh Air chatting with 83-year-old Maurice Sendak.

He knows he's facing the end of his life, he's sad, he's athiest, yet he's full of wonder and love for the world.

If you have 20 minutes, go here and listen. It's so worth your time.

Since I saw you last

I've floated this household across a sea of corndogs and Ore-Ida Fast Food french fries, made cookies, constructed gingerbread houses, put up and taken down a dead fir tree from the corner of the living room, wrapped and opened presents, gone snow tubing at Snoqualmie pass, snapped at my children, hissed violently at J. for doing the same, turned 43, started reading a book on a Kindle, considered e-publishing my "quiet" YA manuscript Spectacle, begun planning a solo trip to China for next October, consulted with a plastic surgeon about my wrinkles then decided that I am a map and a storybook and for now will stay that way, eaten my weight in salted chocolate, got drunk on Jolly Roger Christmas Ale, and hid in the stairwell when I couldn't take being around people for another second.

It's been an eventful few weeks.

Constant motion

Perfect, oyster-translucent skin. Ribs that heave as you breathe. Your arms bent, legs taut, ready to run at me.

You all but puff steam from your nostrils. When you charge, you try to knock me over, but your eight-year-old body isn't substantial enough yet. You are angles and bones.

Your torso rams into mine and I purposely fall back. I know that in a few years you will be able to take me down, but for now you are still a small boy.

Earlier you looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror, arms up, studying your biceps. "Do I look strong?" you kept asking.

"Yes," I said, even though you just looked skinny and cute.

You are energy and exuberance embodied right now. You exhaust me. 

 

 

But you also give me so much more than you know.

Miscellany

Max got in trouble last week for writing "You are a dumbo," on a classmate's math sheet. The sheet belonged to Max's friend and Max was trying to be funny and make his friend laugh. On our way out of school, Max's teacher confronted him about it in the hallway. Claire and I watched Max's face turn crimson. He almost never gets in trouble. Once in first grade for crawling under his desk during Music. This time, I wished his teacher had pulled him aside and talked to him privately rather than shooting questions at him where anyone could hear.

***

Some kids at school are making fun of Claire and I can't quite figure out why. It has to do with a game and the others telling her she's not good at it so she shouldn't play. I want to go up to each of these children and flick them on their small heads. I won't, of course, but the meanness...it starts in first grade. Damn.

***

J. is working like crazy again. He hates it. I hate it. It negatively affects the family dynamic in a major way.

Every time his work consumes him like a licking, snapping house fire, I fear that everything we've built will disintegrate into a pile of fluffy ashes.

***

Claire was home sick two days last week. We had a decent time together. She stood with me, shivering and feverish in her thick winter coat while I strung lights on the two tiny shrubs in front of our house. I made her french toast, which we can never have when Max is home because of his egg allergy.

At the end of the second day Claire felt good enough to pluck tags from her school's giving tree and go with me to Target to buy the presents. We went a little crazy. Because when I saw slips of paper that said One pair of boy's black socks, size large and Sleeper for an 18-month-old and A pair of girl's leggings, size M, and Hygiene products for a 22-year-old woman, I couldn't not take them.

I had to stop reading the tags. I shoved them into my purse and dragged Claire out before I swiped them all.

***

More rejections on Spectacle. I feel like a massive loser. Still, that doesn't stop me from pathetically starting a new project while I continue to seek representation for my finished manuscripts. I need to be stopped before I start slapping them all up into Amazon's e-books site while frothing at the mouth and gulping chablis like water.

***

Max wrote a school report on Ireland. This was his chapter on Food and Drink: 

There are many foods and drinks that Ireland likes. Some foods Ireland likes are potatoes. Some drinks Ireland likes are beer. That is all the stuff Ireland likes.                  

And this, despite our shitty, shitty mornings, is why I like being a mom to these two goofballs.

Six

It was the worst day ever

she says as she rounds the corner

Lips drawn down

Eyes pale

You have lots of worst days ever

I remind her

She shakes her head

And offers up a small award she got in gym class

See? I raise my brows at her

This is not what she wants

She wants to believe, right then, that everything is awful and bad and wrong

The most horrible

Ever

She lies on the floor of her room like a deflated balloon

Unwilling to tell me why

This is what it’s like to be a man, I think

Momentarily, I pity the other sex, trying to figure us out

I give up and leave

She'll talk when she's ready

Or not

We are in the fecund pool locker room

She changes from her wet suit into dry clothes

Nothing is ever fun

I wither

because I swam through blue-yellow water

teeming with kids

for her

I understand this is payback

But that doesn't stop it from being 

hilariously dreadful

Besotted

Some things I am currently loving:

Pictures drawn by my kids. Especially when they illustrate their love for me.

 

Shopping carts with cup holders. It's the only thing that makes fetching groceries endurable.

 

The holds section at the library. Seriously, I'm hardly spending money on books at all anymore.

 

Matches. My big, plastic candle lighter ran out of juice, and I've rediscovered the simple pleasure of lighting a match. The scratch, snap, and sizzle.

 

My new slippers. I finally had to trash my beloved old standbys, which were embarrassingly ratty.