Trauma For Dummies

We're moving: pardon our dust

2011-04-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

I'm moving to a wordpress blog, for reasons that more tech-minded people will understand and assuming I'm doing this for. (If said tech-minded or at least wordpress-savvy people want to offer any pointers, I'm all ears.)

Anyway, if you've subscribed, please do it over here insteadicals:
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Thanks. And thanks, Blogger, for being the first.

What's the World Come To?

2011-04-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a 2001 essay by Rebecca McClanahan, a professor with whom I have been lucky to study at grad school (however brief—I was a fiction emphasis, and she's a well-known non-fiction writer). It's called "Book Marks," and it has to do with her obsession with the marginalia of used books, particularly with the written clues left by this woman who had checked out a book of poetry at the New York Public Library just before she did: her annotations, circles and underlines, and various bits of self left between the pages (a smear of red lipstick here, a strand of graying hair there).

The essay is from a well-worn copy of The Best American Essays, 4th ed., a book I bought used from Amazon at the start of my first year of grad school. I was unemployed, so I took out student loans and chose the cheapest of the cheap books—the front cover of my copy is permanently flipped back and the notes in the margins (written in ink) practically outnumber the printed words.

In her essay, McClanahan forms a composite image of the woman who possessed the book before her based on the phrases her pencil found, like "serviceable heart" and "Grey-haired, I have not grown wiser." She recognizes herself in what this mystery woman has found significant, and worries for her—for where these poems will take (have taken) this woman, and how dark it is there.

My own book is filled with the notes of some mystery woman—if I can stomach calling her a "woman"—who writes in the soulless and unhurried bubbles of a perennial eighth-grader. I remember learning to write this way from my more popular peers in junior high: the a, c, u, and g are all just an "o" accessorized with a curl or stem; I can practically hear her whisper the count of two humps or three as she conducts her neat m's and n's; her y is a gaping and vulgar thing, whose tail comes up to meet its mouth.

This is the handwriting of an idiot. Of someone whose brain drones and hums at a steady, predictable pace, unsullied by ideas or memories or anxieties. Were it not a college text, I would go easier on the girl/woman. But come on. You can vote for President of the United States at her age.

The pages are also filled with the encircled words she does not understand, with an impressively straight line ending in an arrow that points to the definition as it is explained to her—either by Mirriam-Webster or a brighter roommate. "Gauzy" ("thin, light"); "Audible" ("loud enough to be heard"); "Harlequin" ("traditional comic ch."). She sometimes gets these definitions wrong, like "Auburn," whose arrow explains "White;" sometimes, her definitions are puzzling, like when she writes "In ancient times, an unbreakable stone," next to "Adamant." Why did she choose the etymological definition of the word? Was this an extremely helpless mind or an unfathomable genius?

More disturbing still are her summations of the text. This is the essay's first line: "I am worried about the woman. I am afraid she might hurt herself, perhaps has already hurt herself—there's no way to know which of the return dates stamped on the book of poetry was hers."

Next to it, the bubble writing reads "Cares for others."

Another paragraph down: "There's no way to know for certain that the phantom library patron is a woman, but all signs point in that direction."

The student writes "Then why worry if you don't even know its [sic] a woman." The absence of a question mark suggests a tone. You know it. It's that vacant, slurring, dismissive voice that undergrads have adopted en masse—the one that puts question marks? Where they shouldn't be? The one that makes the now-blameless 1980s Valley Girl "oh my gawd!" into a mentally challenged "uh-eye-gahw."

The way kids speak these days!

At the bottom of the first page, our Voltaire writes "The author can relate to the mystery woman," and on the next, after a list of the author's history with reading Sylvia Plath, Keats, and Shelley, the girl has written, as if struggling to make meaning: "Very into poems."

"Stymied" -----> "Frustrated." Which is what I'm becoming as I move through the text, now unable to concentrate on McClanahan's foray into self-discovery through the literate habits of a stranger, thanks to the inane chatter of this half-wit with the bubbly penmanship. As the essayist describes her lonely college days, in which her dearest friends were the people who'd used her textbooks before her, exploring the clues left by them—a pizza sauce stain on a map of South America, a misspelled "orgassm" between the sentences of John Donne's "The Canonization"—I can't help but feel fortunate that I had a social life (too much of one, if we're honest about it) when I was a freshman. I also can't help but feel cheated: I wasn't assigned any John Donne. I also was never assigned any Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. I've read (and performed) plenty of Chekhov, but I feel bereft. I'd gladly trade my To Kill a Mockingbird experience for The Brothers Karamazov, and now that I'm older and my brain is damaged from trauma and checkbooks and housework, I worry I don't have the attention span for it.

In other words, I'm afraid this is as good as I'll get.

I wonder if this girl felt the same way, for even a second, before scribbling "thinks beyond & gives questions to story" as if she is trying to assemble clues, not about a previous reader, as does the essayist, but about the author herself; as if struggling to understand what makes a writer care. About something like words.

By the end of the piece, I have absorbed nothing of McClanahan's essay but an uncharitable feeling towards today's youth. Mind you, I'm "today's youth" to many. I'm sure they overhear my conversations with my friends on the phone, my vulgar "fucks" and "douchebags," the quacking "mah!" that I use to express dissatisfaction, and think language is dead in America. By the end of the piece, I can relate to the Denise Levertov poem that inspired this essay: though grey-haired (here and there, in certain light), I am no wiser.

I am angry with the world, for what has been lost, for where it is going; but more, I am afraid. Around me, businesses spend hundreds on signs that misuse an apostrophe; "there" and "their" and "your" and you're" are so often blithely interchanged, that it threatens to become the norm. Even my educated peers tell me to leave it alone, that it has always been this way—the masses will change the language and we have to let it go. When Chaucer wrote Canterbury Tales, scholars balked at the use of the popular form of English that they found trashy and revolting. They called it "Middle English," which was a pretty horrible insult. Mind you, this is the English that preceded the English of Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, and Virginia Woolf. If any of these fine people were to stand behind me in line at Target, they'd bury their face in their hands and sigh, "What's the world come to?"

Towards the end of the essay, McClanahan begins to distress about the mental/emotional well-being of the reader before her, who seems to have derived support for her suicidal state in lines like "gradual stillness" and "fumes/swirled in our heads and around us."

Next to it, the girl has written "She does as the woman (maybe she is the woman)."

At the end, McClanahan realizes that the notes in the margins have become their own poem of despair, whose author she longs to find and give hope to—to say, "Wait up, I want to tell you something." Hers is a story of grace, and mine has none. Her story is that of two older women, educated and weaned on what we can guess is the same canon of poets and writers, one of whom has hope to give the other. My other and I were assigned this book for what appears to be different purposes; I can't imagine what hers was—a mandatory reading comprehension course? A B.A. in Communications? I feel angry at the gap between us, between our educations. I am afraid of the ever-widening gap between even my uneducated grandparents and the drooling dummies at the table next to me in the café near the college. I worry that "intellectualism" is increasingly denigrated by folksy moose-shooting politicians, orange-peopled reality TV shows, and gossip magazines, and that it has already begun to inform voters' decisions to support (or at least turn a blind eye to) Congress cutting funding to schools.

I am angry that I know the meaning of "dirigible," and that this girl has been turned loose on the world thinking it is merely something that "can be directed or steered." I know it for a silver, bullet-shaped ship that is somehow lighter than air but can carry hundreds of people. It was once the vision of the future: a sky filled with these wonderful humming things whose ingenuity, while one time awe-inspiring, would now be commonplace. Where the brilliant minds that conceived it were respected, trusted, and put in charge of building a beautiful world. Never mind the Hindenburg; I would love to live in a world like that.

Notes From the Field

2011-04-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

Rumi (as translated by Coleman Barks) wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

I’ve had this quote in mind while writing the book these last five years, talking about the book, and generally sitting around thinking about the book – doing my imaginary Terry Gross interviews and such.

Those first several weeks after it happened, I had to tell people that, no, I didn’t hate him. Then, years later, at the trial, I had to tell people to stop saying things like “I hope he gets life in jail” unless it was for their own benefit. And even then to please keep it to themselves.

Actually, what I said was, “I don’t.” That usually shut them up.

People ask, “Weren’t you angry?” But this is the funny part: right before I can answer, they make sure to insert “Because I would be.” And then, as if to make sure I still felt naïve enough to think I could safely and honestly answer the question, they’d add “...but that’s just me, I don’t know.”

If this whole ordeal has taught me anything, it’s that if any question requires a “but that’s just me” at the end of it, don’t ask it. Or do, and resist the urge to weigh in. See what happens.

We can learn a lot when we just shut the fuck up.

When I was in eighth grade, I lied about my cousin dying to the attendance lady on the phone, and stayed home. My mom didn’t know because she went directly from her boyfriend’s house to work that day, calling us in the morning to make sure we were awake and heading out the door.

Sure, Mom. A 12-year-old and her 9-year-old brother will, when given the chance, rise up with the dawn and fix themselves a healthy, balanced breakfast, after which brushing their teeth and hair, and making sure to lock the door, get to their separate bus stops on time, and bound joyously into their homeroom right as the bell rings. And also, toucan farts powered the first Brazilian automobiles.

Mom was in no mood for sarcasm when she called me that afternoon, demanding to know why she had to hear it from the attendance office at Marco Forster Junior High that her beloved niece had been killed, and that, by the way, she was late for the funeral.

I had hoped she would see that her irresponsibility allied us in this subterfuge against the school system, but alas, she sold me out. I ended up having to do 6 weeks of after-school detention, and a session with the school counselor, a frumpy, poodle-headed woman whose cheeks had an unfortunate relationship with gravity.

She asked me, at first, why I was skipping so much school. Apparently, they surmised that all the other phone calls – the ones they never checked up on with my mother at work – were bogus, as well. But I was glad she asked why I was skipping school: I was pissed! I was an angry child. I knew some great injustice was being done to me and my brother (actually, I hated his guts and thought he was part of the unique level of hell I’d been assigned to), having to live in a tiny apartment with dirty carpets, never getting to buy Guess jeans, never getting help with my homework or encouragement to join clubs or take ballet, while all the girls around me had ponies and Contempo Casuals outfits and the confident look of people who will be picked up on time after school, and not by a grudging mother’s boyfriend in a 1977 Malibu with no muffler.

But to warm up to sharing such private torments, I started with, “Because this school sucks.”

To be fair, it did pale in comparison to the lovely campus and friendships I’d left behind in Mission Viejo when Dad grew bored of his custody of me after one school year. I had begged and sobbed and screamed at both of them to let me continue junior high there, to not force me to make new friends among the spoiled surfer brats of Dana Point and Laguna Niguel, to not drop me in the midst of those drug-dealing Satanists that roamed the schools in search of perfectly good kids to rape and murder in the public restrooms at Doheny State Beach. I even offered to get up two hours earlier to take a series of public buses that would go the 10 miles farther up the freeway to my old school. For that, I would have gotten up on time and gotten my ass to school. I could even do my homework on the bus! When I think of the schools I could have gotten into had my mother only relented and let me go back there...Harvard? Sure, no problem! Stanford? We’d be glad to have ya! Yale? Allow us to pay, please!

I tried to explain all of this to the guidance counselor, whom I had apparently disgusted to the point where her cheeks swept the desk as she spoke, collecting bits of eraser shavings and fallen flower petals. She narrowed her eyes and said, “You don’t deserve to be here.”

“Yes!” I cried, “You understand exactly!”

She went purple as she listed the wonderful things about this marvelous school that I seemed to have missed, such as the zzzsperbsk and the hrmyjrbylirby, reasons to love Marco Forster Junior High that I didn’t hear at all, for the blood filling my head. All I remember from her rant that day was “You don’t deserve to be here.” And how true it was, and how little we understood each other. But then, it wasn’t my job to understand her, or even to communicate clearly. She had a framed degree on the wall behind her. I was an angry 12-year-old.

I often wonder why she was so ill-equipped to talk to a kid my age about their unhappiness. Why she couldn’t see in front of her was a child who had it pretty bad at home, who had some very legitimate complaints about the way things were, but none of the clarity of experience to know that it didn’t need to be this way, or that I didn’t deserve it. Why she couldn’t see that I was embarrassed to have people over, that I was sick of having to leave friends each year after I’d just start to get close to them, why she couldn’t see that I didn’t enjoy throwing scissors at my brother or having my flesh bitten into by him every single day of our unhappy lives – we just had no one else to take it out on.

Had she shut the fuck up long enough, I would have eventually told her all of this, and then she might have been able to actually use that framed degree on the wall behind her. She might have told me to hang on, to do my best in school, because it would get me free one day – get me where I wanted to go. She might have told me what I needed to hear most, which was: no, you don’t deserve this. She might have told me to keep writing in my journal – to take it to the park after school each day instead of going home to fight with my brother over who got to play Nintendo until mom came home. She might have told me that the world was my wonderful oyster, and that the choices I make have nothing to do with the choices the adults made for me when I was young and powerless. That we are never powerless, so not to be petty or angry or spiteful or jealous.

She wouldn’t have been able to save my mother, but by God, she might have been able to save many, many people from me.

But that's just me...I don't know.

Bad Dream

2011-03-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Gaaahhh. Worst dream EVER.

I dreamed I was the reason that my mom died - and Chloe. (For new readers, Chloe's the dog I gave my mom for Christmas when I was 19 that now lives with me because my mom was murdered 5-1/2 years ago. She is my heart and skin and bones, and I spoil her rotten and she's wonderful and sweet and everyone loves her, including the entire jury at my mom's murder trial, who, after the verdict was read, swarmed me in the hallway to ask "Where's Chloe? Is she okay?")

I don't recall how I killed my mother, but I'd killed Chloe by leaving her outside with no water. (I killed a guinea pig this way when I was 12.) Now they were angry zombies, à la Pet Semetary, and they were threatening my brother, my husband, and I. We were living in my grandmother's house. I had to lock up my mother in a shed across the street, and I knew she would have to be destroyed, and that I would have to do it.

I confessed to my little brother that her death was my fault, and that she was locked up and needed to be blown up with some C-4. I don't remember what happened to Chloe.

In fact, if I don't remember any other details of the dream, I bet I will take this feeling with me to my grave: of saying "I have to tell you something..."
And then the feeling, when the shed exploded, that I had lost her all over again.

: Your dream's drivel and no one wants to read it!

Me: Shut up bad-child-actor critic in my head!

: Also, someone's just published a memoir about their mother's death, and the market's flooded. You're wasting your time. Get a real job. That's what this dream was about.

Me: Her mother died of cancer, and mine was murdered. Also, I found her body. A lot of other stuff happened that I need to tell people about - and in my voice, too. There won't be anything else like it.

: People don't want to read something tragic and uncomfortable in this day and age. Write that book you've been thinking about instead - the one about the pony running for mayor.

Me: Et tu, Undead Cat? Et tu?

: Besides, you don't even know how much of the book is finished and what order it's all going in.

Me: I was hoping the right editor would help me. You know, like Maxwell Perkins. Someone who believes in what I'm trying to do and helps me assemble it.

: Those don't exist anymore! Editors don't want to see it until it's already totally marketable and ready to hand directly to Oprah.

Me: Oprah would love my book, Pennywise! She's exactly the person who would love it.

: No she won't! It's too esoteric and arty. You try to seduce your mother's mortician. It's gonna be dead in the water! Hahahahahahahaaaa! Just like you, fat boy!

Me: I'm not fat...or a boy. Stupid clown. You'll see. I'll finish it. And I will find peace. And I will write that novel about the pony running for mayor. (Spoiler alert: he trends high in the Gallop Polls. Ba dump bump.)

The Perils of Working From Cafés

2011-02-23T13:58:00.000-08:00

How Depression Feels To A Writer

2011-02-22T18:05:00.000-08:00

Or, Why I Don't Go To Media Bistro Mixers Anymore:

Back to Work

2010-10-20T09:32:00.001-07:00

I've been watching Dexter. What three seasons of watching people get stabbed won't do for a trauma you've gotten too comfortable with!

Honestly, it doesn't elicit more than a small twitch anymore. Used to be, someone would get stabbed or have their throat cut in a movie and it would send me into a trance for a while. I'd have to get up and walk around, shake it off. Now it's just a quick jerk into the dark place, and I'm back.

Small trips to the dark place are good for me - I've always been a darkly humored person.

The day of my wedding, I told my friends to let me know my husband-to-be arrived safely, because I was certain a tractor-trailer would kill him on the way there.

Things can't go this well for this long, can they?

I told my husband I want three children, because when one dies, you'll still have two to keep you going. I was serious.

But this is what you do - you hope for the best and plan for the worst, right? It's just smart. It's survival. At least I hope. I hope big. And I have this vague—not belief but—premonition...it will all be grand. Who knows? It could be delusion, another survival mechanism.

But I'm writing this book. I know how again. And my short story was picked up by North American Review, so I can no longer use the "I suck" excuse. I will write every day until I write as well as that again, remembering E.L. Doctorow's words.

Ugh. Hoping I can do; planning for the worst I can do; watching throats get cut and reading coroner's reports and reliving my own police interview I can do. It's all this goddamned work that I can't stand.

Open Letter to the Guy Who Has Volunteered to Be My Husband

2010-08-26T11:40:00.001-07:00

I pity myself a lot. I thrash about, stay in my pajamas all day, let the laundry sit in the washing machine, refill my mug with hot water four or five times until the tea leaves have nothing left to give.

I lie down in the bath and blow bubbles. I stare at a shard of grout becoming dislodged from between the tiles. You ask me what's wrong and I look at you like you're the world's biggest idiot. Same thing that's wrong everyday, duh.

There are a hundred pieces of paper scattered on the floor of the office, each one is covered in ink, codes and symbols that mean something to me. They mean I am a terrible writer. They mean I am a coward. They mean I do not have the language to narrate the trip I took to the moon. How many people get to go to the moon? It should have been a better writer instead of me. "They should have sent a poet," exclaims Jodie Foster to the galaxies laid out before her in that ridiculous movie Contact.

There are pieces missing and, instead of writing them, I twirl the covers around me in bed and make myself into a burrito. I stare at the TV. I spend hours feeling my heart slam into my ribs.

I am obsessed with myself. My self. Self self self self self.

And this morning, when I whimpered, having been denied validation by another literary magazine—when I said, "I can't write a story better than this one"—you went wordlessly to our stacks of books, the ones that we don't have shelves for yet, and flipped through all your editions of Best American Short Stories from the 90s until you found the contributors' notes from Rick Bass and Poe Ballantine, both of whom fell into depressions, each clinging stubbornly to a story that had a fatal flaw in it that he refused to acknowledge and change, unable to fully see that flaw but ever sending it out until an editor illuminated it for him, and saved him.

I can't believe my good luck. You cling stubbornly to me despite my flaws, my insufferable suffering!, but some part of you can see the masterpiece, and trusts me to continue to edit, explore, revise, and append until I am the best version of myself.

Or at least the version that will get us some fucking money.

Thank you for marrying me. I've got your back.

P.P.S.

2010-08-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

That's not true. I want to tell you everything, but I don't think I can speak the language.

P.S.

2010-08-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

And there are some things I just don't want to tell you.

Not Writing

2010-08-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm really lost.

The book is printed out and all over my floor. I was hoping that if I squinted just right, I would see the finished product and know what to do to get there.

And then of course, there's E.L. Doctorow breaking my balls:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I've come to the devastating conclusion that I may have stopped writing this book a long time ago. All my obsessively making revisions to existing pieces and letting off steam in these blog posts are just me idling the car at a rest stop, using Armor-All wipes to polish it up. I'm stuck here, and I'm sad and angry and I want more fucking time and less fucking jobs and I concede that it will have to wait until after the wedding.

That's not the part that worries me most of all. The part that worries me is: will I be able to remember misery when I am happy? Or will I engage in subterfuge against my own happiness to recreate the misery I need to connect with to write the rest of the book?

I know a lot of mothers and wives have achieved a remarkable balance between writing and living, but I am so far from it, I ache. I physically ache, thinking about a distant future in which I can write fearlessly, freely, and for hours. Do I need to sequester myself to some abby to finish this book, alone and far from the things that make me feel complete?

Or should I just buy some pot?

What Dreams Do Come

2010-07-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

I made a wonderful discovery this morning: I still dream of her!
I was beginning to worry; I hadn't seen her in a while - a few months maybe.

For the first two years, I dreamed of her two or three times a week. In the dreams, my depth of understanding varied. Sometimes I had no idea she was dead and acted totally naturally: fighting with her, hating her guts, pitying her, dancing around a thrift store with her and laughing.

Sometimes, I was breathless with fear. "Something bad happened to you," I said in one. But I forgot what, until her boyfriend entered the room.

In others, I was amazed that she was back from the dead - almost as much as I would be in real life. What are you doing here? You're supposed to be dead!

One time I even said, "We have to call the medical community! This is huge!"
Then I recited her Social Security Number when she asked for it, and I knew it in my dream because in real life I'd filled it out again and again and again.

In that same dream, I said I was sorry that death sucked so much; she'd said no one in the afterlife would talk to her. I said I was sorry and then I sobbed into her shoulder, "It's been so hard on me, you have no idea."

I suspect this last part had nothing to do with her death, at all.

This morning, I dreamed I'd had a baby. A boy. And I was welcoming my friends and family to a park to meet him. She arrived, a little rotund and greying, with these outlandish turquoise spectacles and colorful outfit. I called her "Grandma" and hugged her, and noticed that it felt all wrong. Her being dead, for one. But mostly because I never saw this happening - not when she was alive. And it makes me wonder, at what point was it too late? At what point could the course of her life have led her instead to a park to celebrate her first grandchild?

I could spend the day making a list of moments - and those are just the ones I was there for. It's not exactly the If Only I'd... trip. It's more an aching wish to see how all her alternate universes have played out.

My favorite dream - and this was pretty early on - a spider had stolen her simple gold necklace, which she hadn't worn since I was a child, and had spun it into a web high in the rafters of a barn. I said, "I'll get it down for you," but she didn't seem to care either way. And after struggling to get up there and realizing the danger, I decided to just let it be. That it was more beautiful that way.

When to say When

2010-06-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

I did it because I was bored of the Murder Box. I know every scrap of paper in it. I know how many counseling sessions Victims Services paid for; I know exactly how much the mortuary wrote off the bill as "professional courtesy;" I know the three causes of death stated on the certificate, and I know the time of death, to the minute (which actually has nothing to do with the time she died, but the time when a living witness confirmed it, which was three days later. Never mind that for three days, she was as metabolic as a spinach salad.)

And because I'm an animal and animals will sniff around places of interest until they exhaust themselves or get driven off, I ordered the coroner's autopsy report from my home state.

And because I'm impulsive, impatient, and twitchy, I opened it right away.

And because I'm a selfish ass who's afraid of having a single private moment, I read the first page out loud to my fiance.

And because I did that, I undid the perfect, shiny veneer of polyurethane that my self-protective brain sprayed over the top of everything after the trial two years ago. I chiseled it off in short curls that fell off the sides of that horrible moment that I saw her, and I scraped and sanded until the rawness of those following days was restored to its original beauty.

Two years ago, I chose not to look at the photographs they presented as evidence in the trial - it was the one thing I didn't want to know - I gave myself that in a gesture of loving compassion. And then I undid it by reading the very thorough and unsugared prose of the coroners report of the scene as he found it. Of the body as he found it.

I put the 12-page report back in my purse without going further. I was shaking. I snapped at my fiance when he made a sound - a sound like he'd just discovered me poking holes in myself with a rusty pair of scissors. And I snapped at him and told him not to say a word and not to tell me I couldn't and shouldn't do this, because I had to do it. I will not only read, but illustrate, tattoo on myself, and eat each page of that report - crumple, chew, chew, and swallow every single page regardless of the risk of bowel obstruction.

Because I am an animal. A dumb, sniffing animal, hoping to lift my nose at last and turn to the pack and say, This - This is what it is.

A Trip to The Murder Box

2010-06-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

There's a plastic file box in my closet full of papers from Victims Services, my mom's taxes, paperwork from the sale of her condo, extra funeral programs, and other stuff I can't part with ever ever ever unless-the-house-burns-down ever. I call it "The Murder Box."

In Murder Box, there is also the booklet I was handed at midnight the night I found her, when we were huddled together at my grandma's house, after the police station. They'd sent a counselor to come talk to all of us. I remember thinking that everyone was incredibly nice to us. At the station, the cops had brought us burritos, which I couldn't even imagine eating. I may have even hugged a few. Cops, not burritos.

So this lady came to the house really late - maybe there's a graveyard shift for that sort of thing. Trauma doesn't take a break, after all. She gave us these little spiral-bound guides. I was reminded of Beetlejuice's Handbook for the Recently Deceased. There's stuff like "Helpful Coping Tips," and "Practical Considerations and A Guide for Survivors When Death Occurs." I cannot overstate how much I relied on this guide to do my thinking for me, and thank my lucky stars this didn't happen in 1892, or in Panama...or Do-It-Your-Damned-Self Texas, for that matter.

I'm flipping through it as I write the memoir, trying to recall my mental state - no, trying to inhabit that state, which will be difficult, considering I burned out most of those fuses in the days following. Whatever synapses still fired in that tiny corner of my brain were used to extinction three years later, at the trial. To this day, when there's something to be alarmed about, I smell smoke coming out of my ear. Hi ho.

There are scribbles all over this thing, in blue and black ink. Phone numbers, names. Underlines, circles. Check marks.

There's a section I didn't get around to, but wish I had. "Dealing With the Media."

Children already suffering from the trauma of crime are often retraumatized by exposure to the media. Children often lack the means to verbalize their emotions and may be misinterpreted by both the media and the public. You have a responsibility to protect the interest of children at all cost!

Re-read this passage, but substitute "children" for "people." Really, when this sort of thing happens, there's no distinction.

I wasn't egregiously misrepresented by the media, but you try to sum up everything your mother was and meant to you and how her dying the way she did affects you - and do it the day after you found her that way, over the phone, to a complete stranger - and not even William Butler Fucking Yeats will do it justice.

I swore I'd never try to talk about my mother again, except in this book, which has taken me five years to mash together in a sort of "this means something!" obsession, and which I'm STILL not convinced will adequately represent her. Or me, him, them, us, you, it. I called the reporter up the day the article came out and yelled at her.

When my book is published, who, I wonder, will call me up to tell me it is undignified, disrespectful, inaccurate, and poorly written?

It won't be anything I haven't already told myself, day after day after dee-diddly-doo-dah-day.

In 11 Years

2010-06-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

In 11 years, this man will come looking for me. He will look for me because I am my mother’s daughter, and because I look just like her. That’s not something I could have acknowledged when she was alive. I loathed her, if you want to know the truth. The way she hiccuped, said heh-choo-ah when she sneezed, walked with a slight waddle, picked her lips with her tiny fingernails, the polish chipped off. Always chipped off. I’m in better shape than she was when I hated her, which started when I was around 12. She was 33 then. I am 33 now and I have no children. I will, but I have to make sure of some things first.

I hear her in my sneezes now. And she's all over the things I like: Fleetwood Mac, dirt under my nails from the garden, the smell of the ocean, cilantro. Once, I was in the shampoo aisle of Walgreens when this Fleetwood Mac song came on. It’s cheerful, it’s about love. Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar, soaring and swaying like the palm trees of the Southern California beach cities I grew up in. I heard that guitar and I began to cry. Cried so hard I had to close my eyes and pinch my nose with my fingertips so no one could tell. Like my mother. I’m fine.

The last time I saw her, she was burned to ash. I poured it into a creek in the desert. The sky was dark with clouds, so the water was grey and still—so still, that she just spread out in white clumps. I have a photo of it that I took with her camera. She looks like a galaxy.

Before that, she was a waxy face with lifeless hair. I told the undertaker to close the lid and then I nearly told him that I loved him.

Before that, she was covered by a blanket. I only saw her hand. The pictures they showed at the trial have it caked with brown blood. I was confused, stuttering up there on the stand. That’s not what I saw, I said. In the picture in my head, her hand was always clean and pink, her fingernails tiny and free of polish. It was a nicer image than the real one. It seems that in the absence of a mother, you will protect yourself from the dark.

So the man. He is in prison for 11 more years. He is not crazy, or especially dim-witted, nor dangerously smart. He was an unemployed meth-head with a history of domestic abuse. My mom was a fighter and a drinker. It was only a matter of time. That’s what the defense attorney and I agreed on, in the stairwell, where no one else could hear. My grandma and the DA were angry with me for talking to him in the cafeteria, where the jury could see. They didn’t care about probability, her family. They said he was pure evil. They said this about the public defender. About the man who killed her, they said he was just an asshole. This is how my mom’s folks are.

I have been thinking about writing to him. (Not the public defender; the man who killed my mother.) His name is Junior. Swear! You’d think we lived in the Deep South. But we lived in California, on the beach, surrounded by million-dollar houses and salons and Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs and she’s killed by her boyfriend named Junior. While cutting fajitas. That’s how he justified the knives, anyway. I believe him on that one. She did love fajitas.

When I tell the men in my life I want to write to him, they get very defensive. The men in my life are my fiancé, my brother, my friend who was with me when I found her, and my writing teacher. The fiancé, brother, and friend say they worry about the emotional toll it will take on me, inviting this troubled man into my life. The writing teacher says it will make great material. But he only says this after he says he worries about the emotional toll it will take on me.

I have told them all it doesn’t matter. In 11 years he will find me. He will want my forgiveness. I do not know what I will feel by then. What if I can’t give it to him? Can I live with his suicide? His poverty, rejection, and homelessness? Can I save him by forgiving him? Also, in 11 years, I will be 44. The age my mother was when he met her. I will be the spitting image of her. I will not sleep well that year.

People say things like they hope Junior will “get it in the ass” in prison. They say they hope he rots in there. They say he might get shivved, or shanked, or whatever can happen with homemade weapons in prison. When I think about this, I want to write to him.

I wrote a short story about him before the trial. In it, I followed him around at prison as an objective third party. I referred to him as “the man” and gave him very few feelings and thoughts. At the end, I showed up as a character and asked him what my mother’s last words were. People didn’t like that I was so minimal with him. They wanted to know what he was feeling. I said How could they know when he doesn’t even know? They said that it seemed like I was afraid to go there, as the writer. I said, No, he’s afraid to go there.

A year after I wrote that story, he told me her last words, at the trial. He said they were I’m Sorry. I knew it would be something like that. I knew because I sound exactly like her when I sneeze, and I am sorry for everything. Telling a joke wrong, writing a terrible sentence, feeling depressed, Darfur, litter, euthanized dogs, Polar Bears disappearing, Junior rotting in prison. My grandmother sniffled in the hallway at recess. Can you believe that asshole says she was sorry? Of course I can.

I figured that if I wrote to him, I would have access to his feelings. Or at least I would know if I was right; that he didn’t even know his own feelings. That the level of denial he had to submerge himself in just to get by would have to be such that her name and face would become ruins, crumbling and chipping away like the polish of her nails. And if it disappeared, he would leave me alone. He’d stumble into the sunlight in 11 years, blink twice, and start over. He would not need my forgiveness, nor need to see my face. We might both be free then. My letters would remind him, even though the jagged squiggles of my writing would be so different from her graceful loops. She was right-handed, I am left. She was slow, I am quick. She gave up. But we would both have done this. Written to him. We would both start the letter the same way. We would both begin with I’m Sorry.

I Always Have Waitressing

2010-05-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

Herman Melville turned in his manuscript of Moby Dick, flushed with pride, certain he had a masterpiece, certain he would achieve fame at last. It was panned critically and ignored by a public whose attentions had flitted to the Wild West. He died in obscurity, a customs agent.
Stupidly, stubbornly, I inch my way to the front of this long, long line.

Dead Letters

2010-05-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

The mail stopped coming. And when it did, it felt exactly like everyone said it would. Only, they weren't talking about receiving your deceased loved one's mail; they were talking about grief. One day, you'll wake up, they said, and it will be gone. You don't notice it's gone until several months later, when you happen to be sitting on your front porch, staring at the mailbox, noticing the extra name you had written there.

Then a whole new layer of grief is revealed: I'll no longer see her name through the plastic window of some homeowner's insurance solicitation. The endless credit card offers. One time, AARP even sent information offering their discount on a certain cruise line. My mother was 49 when she died, but as far as AARP was concerned, she was still kicking around and just beginning to ask for her senior discount at the movies.

One time, she received an offer for financing from a funeral home. If that isn't the nadir of marketing savvy. It's nice to know that, at least in death, we'll all have such good credit.

And then, once that's over, it's like the real death. After all, when someone is absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can't make a single solitary dime off of you, you are free, you have slipped the surly bonds of the economy, and have floated off into the ether.

I moved, and I forgot to include her name in the forwarding request I sent in to the post office. This was 8 months ago. All that mail the new tenant must be receiving, and marking "Not at this address." Somewhere in Texas, a dead letter office filled with opportunities for her.

A Lesion of the Liver

2010-04-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while doing a sonogram to get to the bottom of my sudden abdominal pain, they discovered a lesion on my liver.
"Just one?"
"Well, it could be several. It's hard to tell on the sono. I'd like to schedule an MRI for tomorrow."
"How about today?"
"It's not an emergency, because the blood tests show only a minor elevation in liver enzymes, but if you want it—"
"—I want it."

I went into the backyard to pick weeds. It had rained a few days earlier, so they came out easily. Rip. I love the feeling of pulling something out by its roots. Finding the sturdiest point on the stem, wrapping my fist around it, the slight give, and the sensation of each unique root. Some roots are one long tap root - you can feel those slide out a long length of earth. It feels like you are cleansing the soil of a long-seeded ill. Others are shallow, hairy root clusters. You tear them out like hair from a scalp. Or like pulling the tab up on a cold, really gassy soda can. Rrrrrip. Ahhhh.

Sometimes, the root is too strong, the ground around it dry and tense. This happens with the bigger stalks, the ones with thorny leaves and a pretty yellow dandelion growing up top. The stalk tears and the plant's juices splatter my hand and mix with the dirt and seep into the invisible cuts on my knuckles and stings. Take that, bitch. This really pisses me off, so I toss the plant and dig my fingers into the ground, working my fingers around the first few roots I come to and tug. It's not a satisfying rip, but at least it's gone. The fucker.

I don't miss my mom very often anymore. It's been five years. I miss her when I need a recipe, or to know who sang "Free Ride." Now there's the Internet for those things. But I missed her like hell then. Pulling those weeds, a lesion on my liver, probably nothing, but I wanted to tell her most of all. My fiancé is appropriately worried. I tell him not to be, that liver lesions are common and usually benign. Still, he holds me a little tighter and gets quiet more frequently. I told my dad, after he stopped filling me in on his work day, and afterwards, he regaled me with his medical history. This is not to say he doesn't care—this is just how he cares. He relates. I told my brother. Then we both changed the subject.

Still, after telling the three people who love me most in this world, I kept wanting to call one more. I posted it on Facebook. I told my coworkers. I responded to worried questions and well wishes. And still, I wanted to tell one more. One more person. One more who would care as much as I did that there was something potentially dangerous in my body—one who would be devastated if I died.

Not that I thought I would. It's just that we get only so many people like that, and I want my one more back.

Form Follows Function Follows Form Follows...

2010-03-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

A novel in short stories? What the fuck was I thinking?

Input phase

2010-03-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Now that my freelancing gig is over, I have more time to write. So that means I'm not writing.
I am, however, working the stories out in my head when I fall asleep. And then I forget what solutions I came up with. Hi ho. If it was the right solution, it will come back as I'm writing.

If I ever write again.

My conditions for getting into a serious rhythm with this book, which is now due in 6-1/2 months:

Find another job that lets me make enough money to pay all my bills, grocery shop regularly, take my dog for her annual senior wellness exam, furnish my house, buy a wedding dress and cake and caterer, and fix my radiator.

Accomplish all of the above.

Then, let the writing commence!

Until then, I will be working the stories out in my head, growing ever more distant from the trauma itself until I will have no better expertise for recollecting it than anyone else would.

Gargggghhhh.

The End

2010-03-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

At the Guardian, James Lasdun unpacks Chekhov.

. . . the unpredictable shapes of his stories (ask yourself, as you read them, where they might be going: it’s almost always impossible to guess, and yet when you get there it feels inevitable and entirely natural), the endings that “solve” nothing in the conventional sense but do indeed finalise the “correct presentation” of the problem—all this is premised, not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it. . .

I've noticed a trend in my stories. The narrative, driven more or less by the internal processes of the protagonist, almost always winds up derailed by an event that occurs outside of their making, forcing them to deal with it in the finale. A middle-aged woman breaking it off with her young lover is nearly killed by a passing ship in the last scene; a girl unknowingly stuck in the anger phase of grief is in a violent fight with her support group on the beach, when a Flamenco dancer appears out of nowhere and walks into the waves.
They are neither inevitable nor entirely natural, so much as they are the intersections of universes. Still, teachers have referred to them as unorganic. But when I try to rewrite them as simpler endings generated by the main character's own intense emotions, it feels totally inauthentic and against my worldview. As a child, I reacted and responded and adapted to the chaos around me - I had little direction, just dreams. As an adult, I'm aimless, waiting for tragedy and trouble to give me something to do.
So isn't it just my artistic vision that my stories end this way? Is it really fear of staying with the character's intense, climaxing emotions - as I was quick to suggest to my teachers; or is it simply the way my world turns?
Is it necessarily a weak choice to bring in a deus ex machina to simulate the trauma life throws at you while you were in the midst of some completely different crisis - a crisis that now suddenly seems so pathetically impotent? What if it just happens naturally, as I follow a story on the page?
Is not my work, too, premised "not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it"?
Chew chew chew. Finding myself as an artist, trusting myself as an artist. Chew chew chew.

Affirmation

2010-03-04T10:45:00.000-08:00

I'm so close to actually sitting down and incorporating the changes I've been thinking about, I can hardly stand it.

Try To Make A Change

2010-02-18T10:22:00.001-08:00

So I haven't touched the book since the beginning of the month, and my resolution was to work on it a little every day. Done in October.

Take inventory.

Have:
1 story near its final form
1 story that needs major reconstructive surgery
1 story that needs life support
1 story that needs a ventilator
1 story that needs a face
1 story whose death I refuse to call, even though it's not responding anymore

Need:
to establish the mother before she dies
to hire a better writer to write this book for me

I tried to work on my closest-to-fine story this morning, but it took me an hour and a half just to read through it to the part that needs to change. When I got to that part, a plane hit a building here in town. My fiancé came home from work and made me a bagel. 1) Open mouth, 2) accept food, 3) chew and swallow. Repeat.

I have to quit for today. I have work I am supposed to do so I can get paid. Besides, editing and proofing is easier today than creating people out of thin air. Or RE-creating them in all their perfect, hellish beauty.

Here's one more attempt:

She found a crab claw on the beach when my brother and I were kids. She would use her fingers to make it talk like a puppet.
She'd make it say, like Señor Wences from the old kids' show, "Joo want to talk to my crab?"

At first we wouldn't want to, but then we'd laugh and laugh and forget whatever we were angry about: that dad wasn't picking us up that weekend, that everyone at our new school called us "loners," or that the new jerk she was seeing sat on the couch watching "The Judge" all afternoon and made us miss our cartoons.

She was funniest when everything was miserable.
"S'alright?" we'd ask.
"S'alright," went the claw.

Don't Bother

2010-02-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

I once found my mother dead. You have to be careful when telling people this, but in those first hundred days, I freely shared it with anyone within earshot. Check-out girl, person in an elevator, customer service representatives. (Lots and lots of customer service representatives.)

Five years later, it’s something that has been so deeply absorbed that I now say it out loud just to remember that it’s there. This happened. The experts refer to this as a process of assimilation, adding that it can take several years to assimilate something like that – even a lifetime. Butwe're all assimilating something or other: what’s the difference between finding your mother murdered and enduring a childhood of unflagging emotional abuse? Finding the love of your life in bed with someone else and surviving a plane wreck? I have a friend who still winces when people move too quickly near him. He was beaten savagely as a kid. Who but him bears the standard of his horrors?

Then there’s the guilt of context: Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia, Bosnia, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition. Jesus, just being alive in the 14^th century sucked worse for even the wealthiest, most syphilitic aristocrat than it ever has for me and my one lousy dead parent. Even if I was the one who found her like that.

So why tell this story, at all? Am I that narcissistic? Well, why not - everyone else is in this Internet Age. The noble answer is: I’m a writer and have a duty to report on the extraordinary in life. The psychological answer is: If I don’t, it is going to eat its way out of my head like some squealing H.R. Giger monster.

I was always like this. I wrote an autobiography at 12 called If God Could See Me Now. It was three pages long. (Three pages is a lot for someone who’s enjoyed only about 7 years of thoughts more sophisticated than those of a Fox Terrier.)

It dealt mostly with the feelings of isolation and abandonment that succeeded my parents’ screwy, long, and turbulent divorce. I still think it’s one hell of a good title, only it would be re-imagined by some Focus On The Family-style proselyte with a junior-high understanding of matters spiritual and intellectual, and packaged as “Inspirational” reading for the Costco and Sam’s Club set. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Costco and Sam’s Club set. I hope one day to be purchased in such a fine establishment, tossed in a basket with some recalled designer jeans and a 4-month supply of frozen weiners.

The answer to my inner critic is: It’s not Elie Wiesel’s Night, but it matters.

When I tell people “my mother was murdered,” they often have the same reaction. They stand silent, nodding, waiting for the next bit of information. Grateful for what they’ve already received. Someone once suggested people are just trying to absorb my story, which I find funny and stupid. Absorb it? It happened. Just listen to me. I’m telling you. What’s required of you?

But in these five years, I have learned that by telling a stranger, a friend, a neighbor – pretty much anyone but a sociopathic personality or a therapist trained in maintaining boundaries – I bring them into it. It becomes interactive.

As the executrix of my mother’s estate (an awfully funny word for a condo about to go into foreclosure and several unpaid bills), I had to make many phone calls to customer service representatives. I relished these calls. These antagonists of society! -- refusing to reverse your overdraft fees, remove a charge from your cellphone bill, lower your suddenly jacked-up APRs, and, too often, speak to you without a script and without that confounded robotic voice.

“Hi, Becca, I’m calling on behalf of my mother, who was killed last week by her boyfriend. I have her account number here, and of course I can fax you a death certificate if you need one before talking to me. I just need to get a list of all of her balances for the probate. Hello? Hello, are you there?”

We’d end up having a conversation for half an hour about someone she knew who died. Everyone has a death they’re holding onto. One guy, at Countrywide of all places, confessed his 3-year-old nephew had drowned in a swimming pool some time ago. I cried with him. He couldn’t hold the forbearance, but he got me a direct line to the supervisor who could. There are no direct lines at Countrywide – at least, there weren’t then – so I’d had to explain the entire story to three different people every time I called. Giving me the extension number was a huge gift.

Another woman – I can’t recall from where – lost a mother to breast cancer. I told her that her story was worse. Maybe it was. Maybe half the people who buy my book will have worse stories than this one. Sometimes I feel guilty for being somewhat well adjusted. It doesn’t make good television, as they say. I can’t promise to fall apart in front of you for your entertainment. I can’t even tell you anything about death that someone hasn’t before, and better.

I can tell you this: you have to go into her house to look for photographs, music, and clothes for the service. A man is inside, wearing a paper jumpsuit. He is still wiping the fingerprint powder and purple splatters of Luminol off of the floor, the ceiling fan blades, the kitchen cabinets. The sink is full of steak knives. “I guess it wasn’t one of these,” he tells you. And you watch his face immediately pale. “The mattress is in the van,” he says quickly. You accept his apology and thank him. You thank him three times.