Sex Ed

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I struggle with scenes where protagonists flirt or flush with desire. But I want to capture those moments in my writing. This one story has been haunting me since I was ten years old. Ten fucking years old. When I wrote it then, it had a lot of breast kissing and ended in “the rest, I will leave to your imagination”.  I’m still mortified by that phrase. I was obsessed with sex but had not the first clue about what took place under the covers.

It was five years after that failure before the idea crept back into my mind. This time, it stayed. I never tried to write it again, though.  Then, last Friday, a sentence lodged in my head. My writing often starts with a word-image that requires telling. And that one had the potential to be an entry point to my long-restrained story. So I typed it for the whole trip down to Florida. Bare bones outline: Fighting couple has sex instead. The end.

No, really, that’s the plot. And here’s the problem. I know what happens under the covers now, but other parts of the story don’t work. The fighting couple doesn’t spend enough time in the shift between argument and sex, so the whole thing comes off wrong. I consulted my in-house expert.

“Scott, do these two still jump in bed together too soon?”

He studied my laptop. “ “Something’s missing. I think the man needs to rationalize it more.”  Click. Exactly what I needed to hear. I had been so concerned with capturing actions and dialogue that I hadn’t even considered thoughts.

I was still mulling this over while we tried to write next week’s grocery list. It seemed Scott was, too.  “It needs more … look.” He took away my list. “She does this, right?” He put my hand on his cheek.

“Yeah.”

“Doesn’t that send a chill down his spine or something?”

“I hate the stereotypes.”

“OK, his face, then. What if it sends a chill across his face?”

“Ohhhhh.”

“You need more of his physical reactions.”

We walked through several more gestures discussing actions and reactions. And we, unlike my couple, didn’t have to cover any extra ground to get to desire.

Then, Scott said, “I think we’re still technically parents.” We broke off our conversation and resumed the list before the living room and Wii lost their appeal for our kids.

A few minutes later, he asked, “What turns him on about her?”

“Her hair. It always smells like flowers.”

“OK, so he has to smell her hair. That could set off a moment where…” and by now he was behind me, reaching around to pull me close. I leaned into him automatically, then jumped away just as fast.

“Damn.” We glowered at the living room together.

“OK. Right. Rationalization; physical reactions; turn-ons. I’ll work on that and see what you think later. After the kids are in bed.”

“Definitely. After they’re in bed.”

Trifecta Meet N Greet

Posted on by February 25, 2020

photo copyright Tara R. at the Thin Spiral Notebook. On the left, Lisa, then Tara, then me, then Scott. Caroline is tucked into his armpit, and Sam is celebrating black power at the end.
On the right, you see Lance, then Deana, then their adorable kids, one with golden hair and soulful eyes, the other with dark hair and gentle poise.

This is a quick post to say how much FUN I had this weekend at the Trifecta Meetup. Our whole family loved getting to meet Lisa, Tara, Deana, and Lance. The Burson kiddos clicked instantly with Caroline and Sam, and Caroline kidnapped Deana for a walk down the beach collecting seashells. We had beach time, pool time, and restaurant time. I personally downed four Margaritas. Because priorities, as Tara R. explains it. Somehow, we never got around to taking a lot of pictures. Oh well. Next year, we’re hoping to do it in Portland. Scott’s sister lives in Oregon, so we could totally justify that trip. Here’s one of the few photos. Tara R. Got our server Josh to take a click of us at lunch on Saturday.

Modern Hoarders

Posted on by June 21, 2013

 

My phone rang, a Lexington number, and I prepared my, “Sorry, we moved five years ago but never changed the cells” spiel.

“Ms. Powell?” The woman’s voice was hesitating, as if she were surprised I had answered.

“Ye-ess?” I have no more professional connections in Kentucky. Friends, yes. Strangers who think my last name is Merriman and want to sell me life insurance? Yes. But people who call me by my own last name and yet somehow know better than to say “Mrs.”? None.

“This is Tessa from Central bank in …”

And I knew. The safe deposit box. We’ve tripped over those fucking keys for five years and not sent them back. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more that we’ll be cleaning out one or another of our hoarder cells and come across them. “Shit. Gotta return those,” we’ll say. And we all know which road is paved with those intentions.

So I hung up with Tessa and called Scott. “I think I know where they are,”  he said.

“Thank God. Because they’re about ready to drill into the vault.”

Only he didn’t. And I woke up in a manic sweat at 2AM, frantic with the thought that we have merely misplaced something that is going to cost us a fuck-ton of money. This is the kind of thing that drives me batshit crazy. We are so damned scattered, so completely incapable of establishing even basic organizational schemes, that we lose shit all the time. Important shit. Expensive shit. Like lockbox keys.

I tore through the ‘mail center’ our quaint name for the particular disaster where we store stamps and the like. This was the most likely place to have lost it, because the mail center, being located just inside the door, collects whatever shit we’re carrying as we walk in. One trash bag and two “This is Not My Fucking Problem, Baby; You Fucking Deal With It” bags later, I still have not found the lockbox keys.

But I have located every single lost greeting card I meant to send in the last five years. And all of the kids’ missing crayons. A dozen envelopes I bet we thought we used. Stamps with denominations ranging from thirty three or four cents (with Porky Pig on them, in case you wondered) to four dollars and sixty cents (those feature Airforce One).  A complete set of fingerpaints. With refills. Our car insurance policies for the last six years. (If you do your math, that means I found one from Lexington.) The lockbox keys for our current safe deposit box. Just not the thing I wanted most.

So now, I want it over. I tried to call Tessa to tell her that they would have to send me the bill. But the phone at the other end rang and rang. It seems you can’t leave messages in the wee hours at the bank.

Hoarders Anon

Posted on by February 25, 2020

My grandmother was a hoarder. The real shit. Her parents had enough money for more than mere survival during her depression era adolescence, and she lived the rest of her life with terminal guilt. She came through that and WWII with a deep sense of the value of material things. Not a desire to have them so much as a recognition of how precious they could be.

She never threw anything away.

Not food.

Not magazines.

Not newspapers.

Not trash.

Recycled, yes. GAVE away, yes. Donated to charity, rarely. But never outright pitched. In fact, she went to yard sales and dragged in MORE SHIT every week. She and my grandfather always lived frugally, though he was a doctor and they didn’t have to. The only reason their very small house didn’t have dead cats and a TV crew by the time she died is that my grandfather recognized the problem. At some point, probably once most of her eyesight was gone, he started going along behind her throwing stuff out. In the three years between her death in 2006 and his in 2009, he filled up three roll away dumpsters with garbage she’d dragged in.

And Mom and I (and Mom and Kaylee, and Mom and her friends) still have a ton to go through. We hit the highlights. Fifty trashbags and an equal number off to be donated, plus stuff we actually wanted and other stuff we set aside for auction. But the basement is still impassable, and the storage area over the garage is only accessible because Poppa held a “free yard sale” right after Mummum died and invited people to come take whatever they wanted.

Some of the worst offenders? Doilies. Mummum could have bought stock in doilies if it had been a company. She specialized in doily collection. We stopped counting at 500, and I think we found twice that number, most (all?) handmade lace. Some pristine and probably quite valuable, others in rag-like condition. We had to dig through piles of cloth napkins and placemats to find, buried at the bottoms of piles, and not anything like together, my great grandmother’s handmade quilts. And food. Oh God the food. We threw out ketchup from 2008, macaroni and cheese that expired in 1985, and a six pack (a six pack!) of chili from God knows when. And that was just the side porch; we are afraid of the pantry and kitchen.

But my favorite collections are the ones that are by far the most depleted. Poppa, being a retired doctor, one who kept up his medical license until the day he died, made a serious effort to dispose of the old medicines once Mummum was gone. (He merely hid them until then, I suppose, knowing which ones merely rotted and which became outright dangerous.) Still, he missed a few. And I’m glad he did. I love the old bottles and tubes. I don’t want to own them. Too many visions of Sam finding one and licking out the dust and getting poisoned or something, but I did take pictures. If you follow my personal thread on facebook, you got to see the food last week. But here, in a blog exclusive, are the drugs. These all date from the 1950’s and 1960’s

High Noon In the Park

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Three old men sat on a park bench, setting aside their canes for a little while. In the distance, children shrieked ignorance of their own mortality. But the men rested together, each hoping the others would return on the next sunny day, all well aware that one day soon they would not.

This post is for my grandfather, my Poppa, who will have been gone five years this September. For that long, my mother has held onto his house. But it’s time for her to let go, and she is getting ready to put it on the market. This week, I’ll be with her, helping to uproot memories we’ve both held for lifetimes (it’s the house she grew up in, after all, the one I visited as a child), dislodge furniture that hasn’t moved in decades, and dismember a bit of history, because we must. That house needs people in it, not memories. With no one living there, it is falling into disrepair, and it is lonely. It needs a young family, or an older couple, or some renters with rowdy dogs. But I will miss the musty smell of my grandmother’s closet, the dank basement with its mountains of junk and long unused coal bin, and Poppa’s roses, though those died before he did in any case. Scott will be here alone with the kids all week. Someone please check in and make sure he hasn’t climbed gibbering onto the roof by Wednesday, and call me so I can come home if he has.

Blackberries in June

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I pelted into the house with one mowing glove tucked under my arm.“Sam, the blackberries are finally ripe!”

Scott laughed. “They going to rot before we can get out there?”

“No… but … come on.”  In the five years since we moved to Alabama, I have not once plucked our bushes. They grow out of sight, along a tree line, and I always check at the wrong time. Fruits and vegetables ripen a month earlier in the South than in the Midwest. By the time I remember to look in July, everything except the peach tree has long since withered.

“I want a big bucket.” Sam, at least, understood my urgency.

I promised to keep track this year, but forgot. The kids have been bringing me under-ripe specimens since April, groaning, “Please” to my “Not yet”.  Perhaps it was Freudian. Blackberries grow on monster vines whose thorns break me out in hives. Still, when I was confronted with a ripe berry while mowing, I jumped in the air and cheered. The bush was full, brimming with summer. Sam brought a bowl, Scott left his computer, and I apologized to an invisible Caroline. She was off with friends for several more days, and this wouldn’t keep.

We passed the fragrant honeysuckle bush, and rounded the corner. Sam gasped. Then he shouted, “Yay! It’s time!”

I took off my clumsy gloves and let the thorns jab me. Kneeling beside Sam in the Alabama heat, I breathed in my own childhood.

Mom took me berry picking when I was small, on mile-long hikes to the best patches. Blackberries flourish on the forest’s fringes, where sun and shade come in equal proportions, and the existing scrub can host invasive vines. We dressed sparsely in Ohio in July, enduring sunburns and weed scratches for our exposed skin.

I learned to suck honeysuckle blossoms, chew sassafras leaves, and find sweet grass. And Mom filled three-gallon pails to make pies, cobblers, jellies, and jams. I plucked the ripest berries, contributing little to the actual work. “Jessie, don’t eat them all. I need enough to cook with.” But I crammed my mouth full until purple juice dripped down my chin.

Sam was more precise than my childhood self, but no less voracious. He popped them in one by one, pausing occasionally to spit out a dud. “That one was not tasting so good.” There weren’t enough for any baked goods, so I could allow him the joy of devouring. In the end, we half filled our kitchenware and admired our stains.

He and Scott took the bucket inside, and I pushed my swollen knuckles back into their gloves. But then, I saw a last unpicked section. Down by the poisonous pokeberries that I didn’t want Sam to touch hung maybe thirty more ripe beauties. I hated to leave them, so I took off my gloves and eased into the bushes. And I ate those berries. Every single delicious one.

 

Coincidence

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“It would appear that you are correct.” Shana’s lawyer studied the sheaf of papers again. “But why give it to you?”

“I’m sure he thought it was something else. He’s been handing over my home office piecemeal.”

“And you videotaped the exchange?” The lawyer scratched his head.

“I film everything I have to do with him.”

The lawyer leafed through the pages and pulled out the deeds again. Five of them, rental properties, and Shana’s ex-husband had purchased all of them during their marriage. “You think this is what happened to the savings you inherited from your mother?”

“I know it.”

“And you recorded…”

“Look.” Shana pulled out her phone and played a short clip.

She paused the video when it showed Geoff handing her this particular file. She had filmed the cover page. She reached across her lawyer to flip back to the beginning of the folder. “See? He handed me this folder. This exact folder…”

Later, at lunch with her sister, Shana complained, “Well, Mr. Davidson says he’ll see what he can do with it.”

“I bet he can do a whole lot!” Marley poked her salad, but didn’t eat.

“I sure hope so.”

“But how do you think Geoff got something that important mixed up with your stuff?” Shana didn’t reply right away, and her sister said, “What? What did you do?”

“Nothing too illegal. I had a PI do a public records search for me. The properties are all registered to G.O. Housing…”

“Even the name isn’t creative!”

“But nothing directly connected him. So I let myself in the house and weeded through his files until I had what I needed, and I moved it to my own cabinet.”

“Good thing he didn’t double check.”

“Why would he? He’s never been interested in my home cosmetics sales.”

Marley whistled. “You think the judge will freeze the assets?”

“He better.” Shana sipped her water. “Else I’m out the lawyer’s fee, and the PI’s, too.”

_________________

This is the story I initially wrote for Trifecta this week, where the word is “appear”. It’s kind of boring, though, and I don’t really like the characters. Plus, I’m not sure why Shana would have to be all sneaky in the first place. I realized about six minutes after I finished writing it that I had actually done something other than a Trifecta piece.

This is based on a true story, except the “husband” in the real case was the city of Montgomery, Alabama, and the “wife” was a couple of black families who wanted their kids to be able to swim in public pools. Scott wrote me up a short factography of the events:

In the 1960s, the YMCA in Montgomery continued to be segregated.  In 1969, the YMCA, in that area, banned African Americans from its summer camps, and 2 kids’ parents sued.  The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the YMCA, but since the YMCA was private, even the SPLC did not think it would have much success. However, the YMCA’s attorney accidentally handed over an agreement, from over a decade before, where the city handed most of the pools to the YMCA, aiming to keep segregation (the city figured that the YMCA would have a better chance keeping segregation than the city, and the city had just lost the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year before making this agreement).  Without proof of the transfer, the SPLC could not have won as easily as it did. Without the case (part of which went all the way to the US Supreme Court), the YMCA would not have desegregated, and the YMCA has said as much.

____________

So you wouldn’t have seen scenes like this

The pool is empty because it’s adult swim, that magical and ridiculous hourly ten minute lifeguard break when all the kids have to get out of the pool while their parents feel too guilty to get in.

at one of these

And here’s what really bugged me about my story. I had to insert a contrivance, the wife sneaking around to get the documents, to create a plausible scenario for her ex turning over the paperwork “accidentally”. Readers would never have believed that he would conveniently do so. But shit like that happens all the time. The YMCA case in Montgomery is a prime example.

And it’s a holy grail, embraced by everyone from Stephen King to Writer’s Digest that, while coincidence may plausibly play a role in the protagonist’s suffering, it cannot serve as a device for a happy ending. Readers reject it. I reject it when I see it in stories. It’s because I read to see an author’s trickiest writing. Getting characters out of a tight spot is far harder than getting them into it in the first place, and I want action, metaphor, and story. Not coincidence.

Ray Bradbury addresses the concept in Something Wicked This Way Comes. When Mr. Dark captures Jim and Will by making them weep as he describes the agonies their mothers have endured at his hands, he tells them coincidences happen. Dark says critics hated Dickens for his coincidences but “life’s all coincidence” (185).* In the next moment, the boys see their mothers, unharmed, walking in front of the library.

But even as Bradbury illustrates the point, he doesn’t rest his story on coincidence. Mrs. Halloway and Mrs. Nightshade, as well as their relative safety, are incidental to the plot. Bradbury gives the boys a moment of relief with coincidence, but no more. To ultimately defeat Mr. Dark and his hellish carousel, the boys and Will’s father must fight hard indeed.

But, and this is the point that brings me back to my own piece, it is impossible for me to take a story which truly relies on coincidence and render it plausibly as if it did not. Not if I tell it straight, and not if I tell it slant. I thought I had done enough by changing the case to one of divorce, but, in fact, I’d only complicated things for myself. And so I chose not to use it for Trifecta, but to illustrate the source of my frustration instead.

*My nook has the 1998 Avon edition, if that helps with the pagination.

The House of Many Clocks

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“What time did the ghost appear?” The spectrologist adjusted his laptop.

“Midnight.”  Dana, the large woman sitting beside him on the couch, edged closer, looking over her shoulder.

“But…” The smaller woman, Beth, fidgeted in her chair. “That means it wasn’t… wasn’t midnight. If it’s twelve o’clock in here, it’s already twelve oh five in the bedroom and nearly …”

“But midnight exactly in this room.” Again, Dana edged closer.

The sisters contradicted each other this way throughout the interview. What time did they eat dinner?  (Five, five oh five, quarter past five.) Go to bed? (Nine, nine oh five, nine fifteen). There were clocks scattered around the house, none of them right, all set a few minutes apart. The spectrologist had noticed it on the initial walkthrough and resisted the temptation to correct every one of them.  Now, his body tilted towards the sinkhole Dana’s rump created in the cushions. “Let’s say it arrived around midnight and leave it at that. And,” here was the heart of the matter, the important thing, “What did it look like?”

“Like anybody. It was solid as you are sitting there. Liked to have scared poor Beth to death!”

“I… I turned on the light, and it didn’t go away, and I screamed so loud.”

“Not transparent?”

“No,” said Dana. “It looked a little … a little like this.” She began to laugh.

“I don’t see …” The spectrologist half rose, then dropped his notebook and pencil. He screamed, but only a short burst, as Dana’s head flipped back, revealing the stump of a neck oozing with gore. He tumbled into the opening sofa gulf, his eyes wide and sightless long before he vanished into the ether.

Dana giggled some more as she readjusted her skull.

Beth looked away. “I… I don’t like this game.”

“But you’ll play.” Dana told her. “Because I told you to.”

The grandfather clock boomed twelve noon, and throughout the rest of the house, the other clocks ticked on.

____________________________________

Things appear to be just about normal over at Trifecta this week, and I’m entering a story. Watch this space tomorrow for the story I nearly entered, but wound up taking in a different direction.

 

Even the gulls

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Evelyn partitioned the tomato into round slices. “You know, they make a tool to cut it all at once these days.”  Her granddaughter Joan shifted from foot to foot.

“It’s called a tomato slicer.” Evelyn thumped her knife down harder than she had intended. “They had them in my day. I never cared for them.” She set aside the cutting board and picked up tongs for the bacon. A grease bubble popped in the skillet. “Ouch!” She jerked her arm out of the way.

“You could cook it in the microwave.”

Evelyn eyed the girl. “You don’t say.” She got ice for her scalded hand. “Get that head of lettuce out of the crisper drawer and tear some up into a colander.”  Her granddaughter started to speak, but Evelyn cut her off. “And if you tell me they make salad in a bag, I’ll send you home to your mother’s to eat some. Brown, wilted before it leaves the store shelves. No, thank you.”

“Sorry, Gram.”

“I know you don’t enjoy coming here…”

“I do!” Joan shredded the lettuce into the strainer. “It’s … quaint.”

“You think it’s pedantic. ” Evelyn returned to the bacon. “Do you know what I wish?”

“What?”

“I wish I was forty two again and standing in the Gulf of Mexico with the sand swallowing my feet and the tide straining me one way and then the other. I want to taste salt in every breath of air. I even want those damned nuisance birds, the ones that screech all day long and into the evening.”

Joan supplied, “Seagulls.”

“Yes. I even wish for the seagulls.” Evelyn had better luck with the bacon this time, and Joan had finished with the lettuce. The toaster popped up four identical slices of bread, and Evelyn prepared their sandwiches. She cut them corner to corner and handed them to Joan to carry to the table. “Even the seagulls,” she said, and she followed her granddaughter to lunch.

__________________

Things are never pedantic at Trifecta, and it’s a good thing. It takes my mind off of the work I ought to be doing. (Q: How can you tell I’m overwhelmed? A: When I write a lot of blog posts instead of my other work.)

 

I Saw Everything

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“Have fun!” I waved Scott out the back door, false smile plastered on my face. Dear God, I thought he’d never leave. And yet, he’s ten minutes early. “Kids, good news! You’re having a play date with Kristopher.”

“When?”

“Now.” Linda’s van honked from my driveway. I herded my children out front. “Hurry up.”

They couldn’t see my hands shaking as I shooed Sam to sit beside Kristopher. They couldn’t feel my heart racing as I kissed them goodbye. They had no idea what I was about to do. “Don’t forget Sam’s six o’clock meds.”

Linda held up the pill bottle. She knew. Moms can’t sneak around behind their husbands’ backs without conspirators.

“I sat in that office typing all day. I barely spoke to him. He knows I’m up to something, but can’t guess what.”

“You worry too much.”

“I think … I guess I need to see it with my own eyes.”

“I understand that.”  Linda backed out and I went inside.

I checked the clock and climbed in the shower. Can’t be late. I really wish Scott had left on time. Early throws me into a different kind of limbo. I dressed to blend in, blue earrings, black slacks, and a lightweight jacket-top.  Ticket? I ran it out to the car. Camera? Phone? Book? All collected. And I was still half an hour early.

I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry about all the mess, and yes, lies. By now, you know I did not go to Linda’s with the kids but, instead followed you last night.

___

I had timed it so that if Scott stuck to the routine I expected, I would leave the house after him but reach the theater ahead of him. Well ahead. In fact, I arrived so early, I had to wait for the doors to open. And I beat him. Good.

Inside, I chose my seat and waited. The next part was the trickiest. I needed to hide. I was a voyeur here, and I didn’t want Scott to see me. Not yet. When he entered, he stopped once, at the opposite end of my row. But he walked past without turning his head. Danger averted.

I followed him with my eyes and zoomed in my camera. I needed to catch him, or this whole adventure would be pointless. I only needed one good shot. I wondered how rude it would be to read my book while I waited. Finally, the moment came.

A woman in a black and white dress spoke his name and took his hand. I had the big lens on the camera, and I caught him receiving the Teacher of the Year award at Troy’s graduation.

The recessional played, and you walked down my aisle, looking everywhere but forward. Then you glanced up and saw me, and your eyes widened. You reached out and touched my arm. That was all. The parade was moving too fast for more. But that look, that touch, I’ll carry those forever.