This page is reserved for writings from the Writers Studio Workshop Participants 11/08/2007

Rebecca Snow
Starting from Scratches
Jeffrey Ethan Lee workshop
11/8/07

I am in the same cubicle where, yesterday, I was the star secretary, the best administrative assistant my bosses had seen in the department—the University of Washington Libraries Administration. I was attempting to input mailing labels into Access, not exactly accessible now. Yesterday I knew what to do with the mouse. I knew where to click and how to format in fast motion. Now, I stared at the screen and realized I couldn’t do this. I kept trying to make sense of the very familiar objects and concepts before me—the computer screen, the Access program I knew so well, now stranger than Neptune. The keyboard wasn’t taking my fingers’ orders smoothly—No, not my fingers, my brain. My brain wasn’t working. Nausea filled me from the bottom of my gut to the top of my throat. Pain stabbed the lower right side of my head.

The mailing needed to go out in a half-hour. I had been trying for over two hours to make the labels work. Yesterday it would have taken me about 20 minutes. The Assistant to the Library Director knew I had been in a car accident last night. She would help me. I carried the big pile of envelopes and the address list into her office. I had never asked her for help before.

“Can you please address these for me? I’m running out of time.”

She looked up at me, her eyes brimming with annoyance. “I’m busy.”

I went back to my desk and felt an anger completely new to me, but in the moment I believed the sensation was entirely normal and appropriate. I tried making my simple project work for another ten minutes and then I stood up, the anger surmounting the nausea, marched into the Assistant’s office, and dropped the pile of envelopes on her desk where they scattered all over her work. I didn’t care and thought she deserved it. “Thanks for your support!” I shouted and marched out her office door.

My bosses didn’t fire me. They took away all my special projects—the “beyond being a secretary” work: researching and writing captions for library displays, coding html for web pages. They should have taken away my job, period. Maybe they felt sorry for me. They knew how I was for the last two years and how I wasn’t now. I kept leaving documents I was supposed to be copying in the copy machine, including the copies. I would forget what I was doing and check the mail slots instead. I remember sitting at my desk and staring into space, I have no idea for how long. My bosses—the Director of Technical Services, The Director of Library Collections, and the Special Collections Librarian—would let me lie down in the lounge for two hours in the middle of the workday. Pain, fatigue, and nausea took over the fear of losing my job.

Where was my family? Where was a home where I could stay and not be afraid of being evicted, where I could heal and not work? My hours dropped to half-time, after the long, convoluted process of receiving disability pay from the first bureaucracy in a long series of bureaucracies over the next ten years. I couldn’t go home. I was the Black Sheep. The daughter that left Dean, the Angel Son-In-Law, two years earlier. The accident, my family let me know, was my consequence for rebellion, my late adolescence, my sudden affinity for going out with my friends and drinking. I had no home but my studio apartment. My dear good friends started keeping an unendearing good distance from me. I envisioned living on the street, being happy sitting on a patch of grass with nothing. But that thought had appeared in my head about a year before the accident.

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Monica Fuglei, Instructor
English
Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences Division
Arapahoe Community College

[Draft from the Starting from Scratches workshop]

It is too soon to write this,

but this is the moment:

What you have is this:

three girls, a wife,

two sons, a friend

bent over your bed,

a view of the Omaha skyline,

and memories of a last sunrise.

Your minister friend

leans over you:

Into your hands, Oh Lord

we commend the spirit

of our brother David.

Suddenly, momentarily

what is missing is more:

the dark monitor,

the strength in my knees,

your breath.

Sun glints off the smudged screen,

a thousand prints of previous rounds,

unknown patients, nurses from every corner

of the ICU,

but we,

as we leave the hospital

without you,

each of us dark,

we hit the sun and stop,

fingerprinted, too.

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Gail Waldstein

[Draft from the Starting from Scratches workshop]

She howled on the floor like an animal. I was there, in the filth and fury of it. I shouldn’t have insisted––should have respected her no, but she was hot, we were hot. The whole travel noise was deafening, a roar of chaos. No routine except daybreak, sunset, our biorhythms. And the children, of course, needing naps, food, diapers changed. Now, I’m strapped with everything.

Odd, in a way, that might be fair. Payback.

I had no idea how much she handled all those years, her mothering was so central, integrated. This nannying crap is not my gig. I grew up insulated, pampered by some standards, an only child in a sophisticated family. My work’s with adult minds, words and subtleties of emotion, not ranting. It was horrible.

I almost expected her to froth at the mouth. And the weeping. I couldn’t control her, couldn’t comfort her, couldn’t distract her. She had to be admitted. But where, and to whose care? I’d managed her fine, before. She’d had her episodes, God knows she blew, but those were hormonal, or situational, events that would’ve tapped anyone. And her behavior was more erratic, but spontaneity’s part of Johanna’s appeal. It’s fresh. Her ideas aren’t even consistently contrarian, for God’s sake, just Jo. Now? Now she’s so drugged it’s like someone smacked her upside the head and…

Kissing her is horrible. She doesn’t bathe regularly and her body, that long sinuous torso, sleek, responsive––only she’s plumped up like a Pillsbury doughboy, in only three months.

Her mouth tastes of metal. Like her fillings are going to come out.

Glad I insisted on fitting the guitar in. Who could imagine something so insignificant would be such a salvation? I play mostly what I know, Beatles, some John Denver, a little Dylan. I’ve started writing music for her. Stroke patients sing when they can’t speak; maybe she’ll recognize my chords as paragraphs. A note is a word. For me. Johanna, bless her ears, can’t even read music.

And her smell, it’s not just B.O., it’s like she has a problem down below, an infection. She once confessed she’d read the diary of a seventeenth century French Madame who applied vaginal juices behind her ears and in her cleavage to re-seduce a wandering lover. I’ll bet that her thinking is so fucked up….

And that baby psychiatrist of hers, Silverman. My God, he’s only a boy. I hope the serious work can wait until I get her with someone I trust, back home. The hospital smells too, clorox and commercial air freshener. The nurses smell of heavy duty soap. So do the kids now. At least her parents have stepped up to that plate.

I am so in debt and out of it. I can’t eat what her folks prepare, can’t eat out all the time either. Although it’s been fun in the city. The weeks before her exit interview, we had a few dinners alone, at least the meals were palatable. Her affect’s so flat, I’m with a mute. I have to monologue or I’d go batty myself. She picks at her food, so I don’t understand how she’s porked up so much. I guess that’s unkind. And inappropriate. A Jew wouldn’t pork up, would they?
She smiles, flat and fake most of the time, but she is radiant around the kids, animated. That’s how I know my wife is still in there––around the kids. With me, there’s a loggy silence, like sound underwater. Johanna’s lead weight, drowning me too.

She’s muffled, like depression, although what she has is worse, far worse. Not that that disease should be taken lightly, take Dad, for instance. I’m not so certain I don’t have a chip off the old man’s blackness, myself. But that’s not the point, she is way down, and yet, the fact she’s coherent enough––finally––to understand her mind broke, that, in itself, is something. Actually, a good prognostic, long term. So, maybe. Nah. Hope’s a child’s nursery rhyme.

Sometimes realism is like truth. Just too hideous. Painful, and very, very morbid. And like truth, it needs modulation, a little bit of sugar, or Johanna’s stupid honey on her stupid autumn apples for Rosh Hashanah. So we’ll have a Sweet New Year. Like there’s any fucking chance.

The weather here’s another abomination. It doesn’t matter we were both born and raised in the East. Our home is Colorado. I miss sunshine. I miss my office. I miss my secretary, my research, and the students. I miss writing papers, my routine. I miss the way she made fun of my importance, then looked at me with something like honor in her eyes. And God, could she love. Totally unguarded.

That kind of intimacy, Johanna’s intensity, the way she threw herself into life, even the anit-war demonstrations, as if the boys lives depended on her, will not come around again. Period.

Even that numbskull Silverman has taught her that much. Every once in awhile, returning from the restaurant restroom, getting on the elevator after saying goodbye to the kids, even early, when I could only visit her in-house, every once in awhile, I see my wife behind the stoned eyes, behind the tepid smile, behind the lipstick––just for a second––Johanna’s there again. But she’s old as time, wqry, judging. And I swear to God––although intellectually, therapeutically––I know she can’t be––there she is––remembering. Blaming. Son of a bitch.

I blink and we’re back at square nothing.

Her speech, her face, a glaze of passivity. Almost peaceful.

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Scratches 11-08-07 by Bobbie Hobbs

President’s weekend in Taos is cold and muddy. We have come here to relax with our anorexic daughter.

We walk and walk the muddy streets between snow showers, jump puddles of standing water, steer clear of dogs catching the sun’s fleeting weak rays. We ski over rocks protruding above a dusting of light snow, curling back the waxed bottom of our skis. We sit in stark white restaurants with little corner fire places that warm viga ceilings and tile floors and watch as our daughter pushes food around her plate, complaining of the grease on her roasted vegetables or the dairy, the sugar. She finds fault with all of it and huddles in her chair perpetually chilled in leg warmers, a thick neck scarf and a long sweater that covers her imagined large butt and very real distended stomach.

Finally, in exhaustion, we drop her off at the Phillips 66 station to catch the bus north to Denver. For a few days we will be free of her tyranny. We will quit walking on eggshells and tend to our own lives before we follow her home.

I want to experience something new, something outside my dreary life, in this place we love so much. We always do the same things, eat in the same restaurants, look at art in the same galleries, and shop in the same stores. This time I need- not just want- to do things differently.

I see the Taos master painters in a museum and when I look at their fresh view of this high desert country I am struck by Ila Macaffe’s lively horses and painted vision of Taos Mountain. We learn from the curator she is still alive and her gallery is across from the phone company. As well as we know this town we are immediately lost. We go the wrong direction, becoming more and more disoriented. We are frustrated with each other and I am a leaf twisting in the wind-back and forth as we wander around. I fight the urge to say, “Let’s forget it-it’s not worth the hassle.” Not worth the aggravation, the raw emotion we unleash on each other. We are outlets for pent up feelings we keep suppressed. Instead I stubbornly insist on trying to find the last living “Taos Master”.

When we find the phone company, right in the heart of the tiny town, we see her adobe and knock on the door. The ninety three year old artist answers and we realize this is not a gallery, it is her home. There are stacks of oil paintings propped up in every available corner, on chairs, easels and in various closets. They are of horses running free, metaphor for the seasons, for the spirit of life.

She tells us about building this adobe home with her husband, about working with the other painters, what inspires her creations as she patters about. She is a four foot bundle of energy. She shows us her illustrated children’s book. She pours us hot tea from an earthenware pot she made. We sit quietly gathering her strength as she shows us old photos of hikes on the Mountain, of people gathered long ago, now dead.

Then, she pulls out the piece de resistance: a small red wooden piano, a child’s toy. She places it on top of a table covered with a brightly woven Chimayo rug and looks around for her cat. She scoops up the sleeping white and black lump and puts him before the piano, urging the animal to play. She holds dried cat food in front of the keyboard as an incentive. Wonder of wonders, the cat plays! Pounding a paw back and forth, stroking the keys on and off as we watch in amazement. What can we say? Who would have time to teach a cat-and why?

What a quirky event we witness, but no quirkier than my life. Someone has the passion, the energy to teach a cat to play the piano. What am I doing with my allotted 24 hours each day?

Here is a woman who doesn’t get out anymore and her life is still vibrant, still full of possibilities. Textures and colors fill her days. Here is a woman with the long view. What absorbs your attention at forty is gone at Ninety three. So little time left. Why spend it absorbed in someone else’s emotional baggage?

We all go through or will go through a great tragedy or loss. How we make it a part of ourselves says a lot about what we value. I don’t want the darkness, the heaviness that descends over my tired eyelids when my daughter comes towards me, unloading her fight with life’s demons, to define my life. All I want to do is take them from her as I listen and yet I know there is nothing I can do. I won’t make it better for her on this cold cloudy February day.

I think of elders, who are zestfully living their lives and realize I must look ahead, to become the story teller of these memories. For the first time I understand life will go on. I can only take care of myself. To keep from descending into my daughter’s hell I think of the cat playing the piano and an old lady’s words: “Please turn the page and go that way>Don’t take me too seriously. I’m just kidding around. If you don’t like the poems look at the pictures”.