Tag Archives: memoir

Why I Feel Good About the Feathers in My Car’s Grill

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Maybe I should have made a really ugly hat. (mainstylelist.com)

Or, to bastardize Emily Dickenson: Self-Forgiveness is the Car with Feathers in its Grill.

Doesn’t seem to make sense. That’s because sense has little or nothing to do with it. Sense is the thing that tries valiantly and in vain to override instinct, synapses, chemicals–namely, hormones.

Let me start again: Every May, drivers in Phoenix are treated to a feast of aviary roadkill. It is often found in pairs. Doves, I think. Of some kind. Rather small. Gray and feathery. In May, one will notice couples of these birds crossing the road, chasing one another from one lane to the other–blind to oncoming hazards much bigger, much harder, and with much more inertia than themselves.

For those of you who haven’t guessed it already, May is, for these birds, mating season.

Made me think of my own mating seasons. The strange, bad, funny, head-shakingly inappropriate choices I made in love on the road to Husbot. In disecting the intricacies of my intimacies, it is easy to not forgive myself some of the remarkable detours along the way. In my MFA Creative Nonfiction program, we were warned about this. Be kind, we were told. Be kind to your younger self. You were only a child. A teen. A young woman. Still a young woman. And be kind to yourself, now. I know everyone preaches that. But it begs the question: If I’m TOO kind, then how the hell will I EVER learn ANYTHING? Ah, that darned rationality stepping in again.

I recommend to everyone who can empathize to drive under the speed limit toward two birds walking in the road–one named Romeo, the other Juliet–expecting them to fly away at the last moment, thus miraculously avoiding contact with your car as birds always do–and then thwump, feeling the impact on your grill and watching a shower of small gray feathers wash across your windshield. It might make you realize that we need to forgive ourselves our mistakes in love. And consider ourselves lucky in all cases in which we don’t end up just a feather under the windshield wiper.

 

 

 

Little Cheaters on God, The End

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Can gods and girlfriends see through pasta? http://www.wielandshoehe.de

Little Cheaters on God, Part 1

Little Cheaters on God, Part 2

Little Cheaters on God, The End:

From a glassed-in booth at the postampt, I told my mother to put away the special pins, the thread so fine it was almost invisible. I imagined her rolling the half-sewn gown in sheets and moving it to the upper shelves of her closet, to commune with her three feathered hats from the sixties. At least the hats had been worn. At least the hats were just hats, and not symbols of a life-sized misplaced hope, some wild misjudgment of both myself and someone else.

We’re postponing the wedding, I said. I don’t know when.

It’s okay, my mother told me. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.

Both R and I were using the word postpone. R was certain it was just a matter of time before we’d be back together again. And I was too much of a coward to say cancel. But every time I said I love you, I’d realized I was crying. And if what hurt the most was telling my mother that the gown would not be worn, I knew leaving was the right thing to do.

I moved to Denver, where I knew no one, to take an editing job. R accepted a position in Frankfurt. He sent me two dozen roses on my birthday. And, now that the world had discovered the internet, we began emailing:

“….I shudder at the thought of losing you. Will you be there in a year for me? I continue to plan my life with you. Love, R”

I told him I was meeting new people. There was someone named S. He was fun, if unambitious. Most important, he liked to kiss me, I said.

R was beside himself. His misery drew out a promise of me to try one last time. On Christmas Eve, R flew to Denver. He still had the same wide, sandy-lashed blue eyes, the same rough stubble over the cleft chin. But now it was impossible for me to look at him without seeing all the hope he had once inspired in me, and all the sadness we’d caused each other.

He brought a gift. It was a juicer.

“Nancy suggested it,” he said by way of explanation, citing his father’s wife.

Sitting on the kitchen counter beside the juicer as midnight approached, he announced that he wanted a new start on new ground, based on truth and openness. Then he said, “Of course you know I’m gay.” He paused, waiting for my acknowledgment. When I remained silent, processing this epiphany, he continued. “Well you are too, right? I mean, you’ve slept with girls?”

I wasn’t, and I hadn’t.

This was the early nineties. It was back before people had gay ex-fiances. I had concluded that our problems were due to my problems: I was unattractive,  inexperienced, and uncommitted. My myopia–not being able to focus past myself–had rendered me legally blind to him.

And now I realized he needed me. He needed me to complete the picture of who he wished he was. His family and two half-brothers didn’t know he was gay. He needed me not because others didn’t accept his sexuality, but because he didn’t.

I told him that perhaps he should have brought up the topic of sexual preference before he’d brought up the topic of marriage. I told him to get back on the plane.

On Christmas Day I bought a bag of oranges. When the universe gives you a gay man with a juicer, at least make the juice.

But I was left knowing that the only real relationship I’d had had been based on lies. That the only man who’d deemed me suitable for marriage was not attracted to women. So what kind of a woman did that make me?

Four years later, I turned thirty. I was still single, living alone with my cat.  One morning, I picked up the phone and heard R’s voice. He wanted to tell me about his job. A nice one with a reputable firm in Boston. That year alone he had traveled to Barcelona, Lisbon, Madrid, and Seoul. He told me about his house. It was a nice one, too, with a dock and a ski boat. He told me about his guy problems. He was afraid Chad was using him. I listened, and told him Chad was using him. He didn’t know how to get out of it. But he feared he couldn’t do any better.

You’re using Chad, then, too, I pointed out.

Well, yes, he agreed.

Like you used me, I did not say. Like you are still trying to use me, I did not say. I realized he was hoping that I’d come to believe I couldn’t do any better, either.

Essayist Susan Griffin writes, “What is hidden, kept secret, cannot be loved. It exists in a place of exile, outside the realm of response.”

I didn’t have those words all those years ago on the telephone. Instead, I said, You have to stop being afraid of what’s inside you. I said this, afraid, still, that there was something inside me that was keeping me from being wholly loved. But wise enough to know that if there was, whatever it was, it couldn’t be hidden. It couldn’t be hidden, and be loved, too.

Little Cheaters on God

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I’m starting a new tradition.

On Sundays, I’m going to post an excerpt from essays I’ve written in the past. This is a way of worming out of sitting down and thinking, but it’s also a way to post some thoughts that have aged longer than twenty-four hours. In spite of extraneous hair growth and bladder control problems, there’s much to be said for aging. And so it  is with steaks, wine, and cheese in mind that I am cheating.

In the spirit of cheating, I’ll kick things off with something from a personal essay called “Little Cheaters on God.” It stars R, who readers first met in Things I Didn’t Learn in a Tyvek Suit. I read a version of this at Goucher College in August, and listeners asked for a sequel. I’ll post one for my cheat next week.

Andy Warhol's 1969 sculpture: Real boxes? Real art? Does it matter?

Little Cheaters on God (excerpt)

One morning, I wrote the word “yes” on the shower wall using his mint-flavored dental floss. I told myself that word would fix everything.

It snagged us a toaster—an engagement present from my parents—which went into storage almost immediately because, after six months looking for a job in southern California, R finally got one, in southern Germany. He went on ahead, and I moved back in with my parents to prepare for the wedding and give my fiancé a chance to find an apartment half a world away. I’d adapted to R’s low sodium, alcoh0l-free diet, but it was a relief to be back in a kitchen where salt and red wine were welcome, even if onions and garlic were not.

via forkparty.com

Phone service was three dollars a minute, so we began to write letters again. This time, it was R, alone in a strange place, who wrote nearly every day, a blend of reports on work, wedding details, food critiques, and plans for our future.

 January 19, 1992

Hi Honey, It’s Sunday morning and all seven of the church bells have been going off like mad. I’m going to go swimming at the Uhlandsbad (swimming pool) in a few minutes. I find the best time to go is when everyone is in church….I haven’t been able to find yams here at all. I’m still in pursuit of the European yam, so don’t cry victory yet…I miss you and love you. love, R

 February 2, 1992

Hi Honey. I hope you appreciate my frugality in using up all these old Kinko’s resumes [to write letters on]. I love you…I bought a car. It’s not too fancy but it’s a car and it and I will be at the Frankfurt airport to pick you up. love, R

February 11, 1992

For gifts—money is a good idea as is cookware….One thing I could use is vitamins,  and anti-fungal foot cream….(I luv your breasts) Cake sounds great. No DJ. Our Baldwin Grand doesn’t go outside. love, R

My mother sewed a Chinese silk and organza wedding gown by hand. She had bought special needles and special thread and special pins, and the boning had arrived from New York City after a lengthy discussion about synthetic boning and steel boning and real boning—they still make it, of actual bone—over the phone with a man in the Garment District who my mother could barely understand through an accent she claimed was Hungarian and my father claimed was fake Hungarian.

“People fake accents like that all the time,” said my father with great authority. “If you sound exotic on Madison Avenue, you can get away with anything.”

How did he know this, I wondered? I didn’t wonder at the time what other kinds of things people might fake.

It might be homemade, but it's still not butter.

 February 14, 1992

Happy Valentine’s Day…I bought you some beautiful flowers. There’s one catch…They’re growing in our apartment….I do like the Germans….I can’t wait to see you. I have our dinner planned….About your lamps, I really don’t think you should send them….Lots of stress at work and I’m dying to melt into you. love, R

Why hadn’t he melted into me in California? Was it easier to melt in Germany? Or was it easier to wish to melt, on the back of a Kinko’s resume?

Armed with the fax numbers of tuxedo rental companies, and wearing a lacy demi-cup bra, I flew across the Atlantic. The bra was not built for a transoceanic flight, and before we reached cruising altitude, was buckling under the weight of its responsibility. From Nova Scotia to Frankfurt, I adjusted my mutinous breasts and imagined a reunion that would make it all worthwhile.

The plane landed and I was flushed through customs by signs bearing long, incomprehensible words. Finally, there he was, sandy hair in need of cutting, outdated wire-rimmed glasses over high cheekbones, a three-day stubble. is arms around me felt like a brother’s, his lips brushed mine, and he turned to locate the exit.

Several hours later, we were rolling along narrow roads through the verdant farmland toward the ancient university town of Tübingen. It was mid-spring, and the newly tilled fields spread on either side of us, empty and brown. I was struck by how three-dimensional they were. How each furrow rose almost a whole foot, how an entire field resembled a miniature ocean of brown rollers, how the soil clumped in clods sometimes as big as my head. I had been looking at fields all my life through airplane windows. This intimate view bore no similarity to the neat, flat geometric patterns of variegated circles and half-circles I’d seen from thirty thousand feet.

I had been looking at relationships the same way. How much cleaner they were on the page, how much simpler in two dimensions! How much brute labor they required. I had been asking myself if, with R, there was more good than bad, as if this ratio would indicate whether I should stay. At least with farming, you know pretty quickly if your potatoes fail, you know each season what your crop is worth. It’s much harder to tell, in love, if you are in the black.

R showed me up the stairs of our tiny flat, and told me to take a nap while he returned to the office. I lay, open-eyed, on the single bed he had not yet bothered to push toward his own to make a whole, under the pine-plank A-frame ceiling in the bright white light of yet a third continent, and wondered what was wrong with me.

I awoke in late afternoon, adjusted my bra, and in the dimming light, explored the flat. In the tiny kitchen, brown bottles like half liter soldiers stood in line against the wall, waiting for recycle. So apparently, R did drink, after all. In the cupboards stood boxes of a macaroni-and-cheese-like spaghetti product. Apparently, R did eat sodium. I wondered if, like the salt-free meals without alcohol, I had been part of an attempted rehabilitation. Maybe I had not been the only one to cross both the international dateline and the equator in search of a better self, and failed.To be continued next Sunday. Click here for Little Cheaters on God, Part 2

Driving Through Life in a Monkey Head

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A short one today.

Don’t you just love evening shadows? Legs up to your chin and thin, thin, thin. Even a dust-filled field between plantings and the thighs you got from your mom, magic.

Last week, nearly a year after I took this photo, same time of year, I’m driving to my mother-in-law’s on Camelback Road at the south edge of this stretch of dirt, heading east, the shadow of my car steady on the arrow-straight road ahead. And the shadow looks like….a monkey head. Maybe because I’d just been drawing, repeatedly, at Gbot’s request, pictures of “mong-ee,” his stuffed chimp, on the Magnadoodle. But my small SUV with its bulbous side mirrors as ears, elongated in the evening light and transferred to two dimensions on the macadam of Camelback Road, looks exactly like a monkey’s head.

“I am driving through life in a monkey ‘s head,” I thought.  “I am looking out a big tinted pair of monkey eyes. I just never knew it.”

What do I look like, to the outside world? It is easy not to put on lipstick. To skip the five-minute blow-dry session. Surely, everyone knows I am beautiful on the inside?

It’s Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” all over again, where people chained in a cave knowing nothing but shadows cast on the cave walls wouldn’t recognize reality–the forms that cast the shadows–if they saw it. But what percentage of reality is the form that casts the shadow? What’s inside, photon-permeable, is no less real.

Every once in a while you get a reminder that the world sees a projection of you–not what you feel you are, not what you know you are, not what your mother tells you you are. My sister told me a few years back that she caught sight of her reflection in a store window and was horrified by her own slouch. She has made a point to sit up straight ever since.

In her ridiculously insightful guide to the nonfiction writing, The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick reiterates the necessity of memoirists to know their “persona.” “These writers might not “know” themselves–that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us–but in each case–and this is crucial–they know who they are at the moment of writing. They know they are there to clarify in relation to the subject in hand–and on this obligation they deliver….”1

Maybe that is what I am looking for, from five to six. Someone who knows who she is, someone who isn’t an inexpert mother, a slacker housekeeper, a whiny daughter, an exasperated daughter-in-law, a completely cowardly murderer of spiders and sewer bugs. The me who doesn’t slouch. I am racing away from the sun in a giant monkey head, looking out unblinking monkey eyes, both limited and empowered by the restrictions imposed by my carapace. Catch me if you can.

Are you, on the inside, who you are on the outside?

1 Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY 2001, p. 30.