Different Voices

silhouette-children

The Rocky Orchard will be my fourth novel; it will be the third one of those novels where I have re-written a large section by changing the narrative voice from the third person to the first person, or the other way around.  The voice — whether the story is told from the perspective of “I did this,” or whether it’s told from an outside perspective of an onlooker as “they did this,” is pivotal to everything about how the book unfolds and how the story gets told.  I thought it would be interesting to post the same section of The Rocky Orchard in two different voices.  Let me know your thoughts.

First person version:

It’s been a long time since I’ve stood on this porch.  One of my favorite places in the world.  I take two more steps to my left, and I am at the exact spot where I can see the farthest in three different directions.  Two whole sides of the old farmhouse and the wraparound porch that encircles them. On the front section of the porch the black wooden swing hangs from the ceiling, a few of my grandmother’s old throw pillows still strewn across the back.  The creaky single bed with its blue-and-white embroidered cover – both there since my parents bought this place – takes up the far corner, keeping its lookout into the cave created by the copse of towering pines.  The overflow bed, for times when we had more people visiting than would fit in the ten other sleeping places scattered throughout three of the house’s four rooms.  Or when it was so hot, so unbearably killingly humid, that Woo would opt to sleep on the porch.  I never slept well when he did this.  I missed him being in the other twin bed in our upstairs room.  I felt betrayed.

Beyond the porch itself, through the slight warbly dimming of the screen’s grid, a panoramic sweep of the land outside.  Not all the much to see to the left, as the stone pathway leading from the porch door up to the dirt road runs up a steep bank.  I have to stoop down to get a glimpse of the road itself; otherwise the view is of a vertical slope, covered by a motley assortment of ferns, and a couple of tenacious mountain laurel, clinging to the slope and struggling to keep their grip and survive.

The springhouse, off to the right in its own little valley, with its eternal smell – a pungent mixture of creosote and gasoline and a million leftover pieces and parts of a million abandoned projects that have been there forever.  Long before we got here. Useless tools, boxes of screws, cartons of nails, shell cases, gas cans, broken mouse traps, hoses, pipe sections, caulk.  We kept a combination lock on the rusty hasp on the springhouse door.  I used to test myself each spring, after a whole winter of not coming here had gone by, to see if I could still remember the combination.  But mostly, I was testing myself.  The springhouse was one of so many things I was terrified of.  I would open the combination lock, take off the old hasp, and see how many steps I could walk into the springhouse itself.  I would stand there, just breathing the acrid air, looking at the relics that covered most of the floor space anyway.  Sometimes I would touch a couple of things.  But mostly it was about standing there, forcing myself to face my own terror, maybe a few more seconds each year.

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Third person version:

“What a strange place to put an orchard,” Mazie thought to herself.  Mazie stood at the exact spot on the wrap-around porch — the one that covered two full sides of the old farm house – where she could see the farthest in three different directions. “I never could figure out why there.”

There was not all that much to see to her left, as the stone path leading from the porch door was steep enough that you had to stoop down just a tad to see the old dirt road at the path’s end.  The steep bank had always been covered with a motley assortment of ferns, with a couple of scrawny mountain laurel struggling to survive on the slope.  To her right sat the old shed, and beyond, the small, spring-fed lake her parents had dredged, and the wide expanse of field that abruptly ended at the edge of the thick woods.  In the spring, if you listened very carefully, you could hear the little creek that lay just beyond the farthest edge of the field, at the very beginning of the trail into the woods.  Full and ripe with the winter’s runoff, the freezing water tumbled over the rocks in rushing abandon.  You could hear it, even from such a distance, before it began its languishing journey from bursting its muddy banks, to flowing in a steady and patient stream, to trickling in ever-shifting paths between the mossy stones, to its eventual disappearance in the flush of summer.

Where Mazie came from, it was a point of contention whether the proper way to say the word was “creek” or “crick.”  Feelings ran strong about this.  Weekend people, people who did not live there full-time – like Mazie’s family – generally said “creek;” locals said “crick.”  But if you tried to say it like they did, to be nice when you were talking to them, they assumed you were making fun and immediately got quiet or mean.  It made Mazie tired to think about.

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Middle painting: Cathleen Rehfeld

Bottom painting: Frederic Belaubre

Saint Peter

A new snippet from my novel The Rocky Orchard.  Enjoy!

Wyeth-5

My parents wanted to drag out the weekend as long as they possibly could.  We all did.  We’d sit around the supper table, everyone getting quieter and quieter.  The cicadas’ drone swelled and then fell as the sunlight faded.  The lights of fireflies appeared here and there, sporadic, few and far between.  We’d pack our stuff into the van, each of us knowing our tasks.  By the time we were ready to hit the road, we were immersed in that blacker-than-black of night in the woods. I feel it now. The end-of-the-weekend languor, the sadness at leaving.  It’s a confusing feeling, like I am partly gone from the place I’m still in.  One foot already out; one still in.”  I say to Lula, “By the way — what would you call this? A hill or a mountain?  This piece of geography that we’re on top of?”

“Oh dear, I’m not really sure I’m clear on the difference.  When does the one become the other?”

“Whichever it is, we’re pretty much at the very top, right?  Once you get out to the main road, it’s all downhill from there, in every direction.  You know what my father used to do?   We’d pack everything up and pile into the car, drive out to the paved road and stop at the very topmost part of the mountain. My father would put the car in neutral, and he’d see if he could coast the entire way down the hill or mountain or whatever it is, going faster and faster and faster, without once hitting the brakes.  Around all those curves and bends.  Sometimes in total darkness — you know there aren’t any streetlights out here.  Sometimes he’d turn the headlights off; he swore he could get a better look at the road without those pesky headlights.  My brother Woo and I would yell ‘Weeeeeeeee Weeeeeeeeee’ and we’d hold our feet up in the air—somehow that was part of the magic: our feet had to be held high up and never touch the floor of the car.  When we got to the bottom, we’d clap our hands and bounce up and down on the car seats and whoop it up like crazy.”

laurel mountain

Lula stares at me and says nothing.  I have learned that this always hides something deeper. “What?” I ask her.

Lula shifts uncomfortably in her chair.  “Was that fun, Mazie?”

“Well, sure.  I just said how my brother and I would be beside ourselves.”

Lula looks straight ahead again for a moment, then says, “I’d certainly be beside myself.  I’d be scared half to death.”

It’s my turn to look straight ahead.  “You’re a party pooper,” I say. “Ever heard that expression?  Know what it means?”

“Of course I know what it means,” Lula says.  “Even if I hadn’t heard it before, the expression is rather incontrovertibly self-evident.  Do you know what that means?  Incontrovertibly?”

“Why are you getting so cranky about this?  I thought I was telling you about a fun adventure we had, and next thing I know you’ve gone all Smokey the Bear serious.”

We are both silent for a long while, which makes me feel sad and helpless.  But I’m also annoyed.  Angry, even.  Unreasonably so.  My own sign that something lurks beneath my surface.  “Did that honestly sound scary to you?”

“Yes,” Lula says simply.

Again, we sit in silence.

“My father drank a lot.”

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“Yes, I remember you mentioned.”

 

I swallow hard.  “He started at eleven.  Drinking, I mean.  He checked his watch.”

Lula says nothing.

“As if checking his watch and waiting til 11:00 made it better somehow.”

Lula swishes a fly from her face.  I squish a mosquito on my thigh.  He makes an ungoldly mess of bug splash and smears of my blood.  I lick my thumb and rub at the spot. “It seemed like we passed so many car accidents when we drove home. Flashing lights and total chaos.  People wandering through scenes of crushed vehicles and strewn wreckage.  Every once in a while, we’d catch sight of someone lying on the ground.  We’d all look as we drove by, and all four of us would give our assessment of whether we thought anyone had died.  Sometimes, we were in complete agreement.  It was easy to see that someone had.  Inside of myself, I knew that could be us.  My family.  It could so easily have been us. I wondered which of us might live.  Which of us would die.

A loud sigh escapes from me, unforeseen. My hands seem to be trembling.  “We were in an accident, actually.  My father lost control of the car somehow, and we careened all over the road before the car came to a stop.  My mother broke her collar bone.  The skin on my knee was completely scraped off, but I was fine otherwise.  My father didn’t have a scratch on him.  Woo, in the back seat with me, hit his head and lost consciousness, I guess.  When the first passerby stopped, he looked in and saw Woo on the floor of the car.  Woo woke up and saw the man looking down on him and said, “Are you St. Peter?”  My family laughed about that for years.  Like it was the funniest thing in the world.  “Are you St. Peter?”

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Top artwork: Andrew Wyeth

2nd photo: Laurel Mountain, Pennsylvania

Fates

Each of these excerpts from my novel The Rocky Orchard is meant to be a stand-alone snippet that piques your interest.  Like the majority of my writing, the past and present intermingle freely; memory and reality can be indistinguishable; both first- and third-person narration are used to underscore these themes.  It’s not meant to be a jigsaw puzzle to figure out, but rather, an aperitif to whet your appetite for more.

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Three little girls.  After my aunt lost all those babies – fifteen, I was told — she had three in a row, bang bang bang, all girls.  First a blonde with piercing grey eyes and an old-soul seriousness.  Once I got over my initial inexperience with babies in general, and my cousin in particular, I thought she was fascinating.  Next came a dark brunette, with huge brown eyes and round red cheeks who grinned ear-to-ear at everything.  Another blonde arrived third, but not the white blonde of her oldest sister.  This one’s hair looked as if it had been painted by hand, the streaks of varying yellow tones perfectly drawn.  She sucked her middle two fingers, not her thumb, which I thought was the most adorable, heart-melting, and wildly exotic thing imaginable.  I watched her in her highchair, the sun doing magic with her the bands of color in her hair, sucking her tiny fingers in between bites of food.

They were like fairies to me.  Perfect little creatures from some other world where they had their own secret language and habits and riddles.

On one of their visits to our old farm, when they were around 7, 8 and 9 years old, the cloudless summer sky suddenly changed hue to a slight gray.  In less than an hour, the sky was a solid ceiling of deep steel. You could not see individual clouds, but rather feel that the sky had moved closer to the earth, and was threatening to cause menace.

Was that a flash, a suggestion of light through the thick wall of clouds?

The faint rumble a number of seconds later affirmed that it was.

My little cousins had never seen a thunderstorm.  There was no such thing where they came from.  And though they had heard about the storms, and read about them in books, they could no more imagine the reality than I could understand their secret language.

After the first, faint rumble, my aunt gathered her daughters.  They stood on the porch of our farm, waiting.  The first few raindrops plopped, slowly enough that you could hear each one hit the leaf, or branch, or patch of ground where it landed.  The rain turned into a gentle, steady shower and a more distinct flash of light lit the cloud cover.  I don’t know which of the little cousins let out the first scream when the thunder came, but they all followed suit.  The shower became a downpour, a rain unlike any they had seen.  The girls grabbed one another’s hands and stood in a tight circle.

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A bolt of lightning shot through the air at the edge of the orchard, not fifty yards from where we all stood, so close that we heard the sizzle as the massive electricity seared through the air.  The quick-following clap of the thunder was deafening, but not so loud that it drowned out the little girls.  They screamed and laughed and clutched tight to each other’s hands and danced  and jumped and screamed some more.

The next lightning bolt came right on the heels of the last, and was even closer.  We saw it stab into a high branch on one of the tallest trees at the orchard’s edge.  The branch crashed to the ground, the sound completely obliterated by the roar of the thunder.  The porch shook beneath our feet.  I had never felt the ground beneath my feet move before, and I could not understand how this could happen.  But my cousins had grown up where there are earthquakes, and did not bat an eye.

It was a day of magic.  Of the once-solid earth moving beneath me, of electric bolts lighting up the sky.  Of the air around us dividing in two and crashing back together in a earsplitting roar.  The little cousins. The Weird Sisters.  The Three Fates.

The kind of magic that is always here.  At the old farm.

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lightning

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Flames

Here is a new section from my novel-in-progress The Rocky Orchard.

candle.gif“Don’t fuck with me. You were definitely talking to him.”  Then, Tim held up his hand, with his palm really close to my face. In the dark of the room, I couldn’t tell what in the world I was supposed to be looking at. Then I saw it. A circle. A perfect circle, faintly reddish-brown, traced the periphery of his entire palm. “It’s from a candle. I put my hand right on the candle and held it there.”

“What?” I said, grabbing his hand to look at it more closely.

“I did it to prove my love for you,” Tim said.

“You did what?” I said.

Just then, this guy standing at the front door yells out, “Hey, is there somebody here named Mazie?”  For a second, I didn’t even move.  And the guy added: “Hey, Mazie, if you’re out there somewhere, your dad’s here. To take you home, I guess.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m Mazie,” I said, and sort of raised my hand like some sort of dork who the teacher was calling on.  I made a straight line for the front door, didn’t even say goodbye to Sam, still sitting in the same chair examining the hell out of her split ends.  I walked out that front door in a stupor of confusion.  Tim’s voice behind me called out, “Hey, Mazie, you forgot your jacket.” He handed it to me then raised his hand to my father, “Have a good evening, Dr. Mills.”  Jesus, he sounded so normal!  So utterly and completely normal, not even a hint of the woozy guy who had just shoved his burned hand into my face.

One look at my father’s face and I knew that he was pissed.  Really pissed.  He had that look of tightly-but-precariously controlled rage, like any little thing could cause him to fly apart into a million billion pieces and rain down razor spikes on anyone nearby.

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I debated whether it would be better for me to talk first or to wait it out.  There’s no right answer to that.

The second my car door closed, he said, “You’re grounded.  For a month.”

“What!?”  I said.  I had never been grounded before.  Not once.  “Why?  What did I do?”

“We had no idea where you were.  No idea!  You never asked us if you could go out tonight.  You’re home for a month.  Period.”

“That’s not true!” I said.  Jeez Louise, this whole evening was bizarre beyond belief to begin with, but now this?  I knew that I’d asked my parents if I could go to this party – well over a week in advance – and I also knew that they had said yes!  This is a really tricky one to know how to play.  Did they really forget that I’d asked?  Well, they drink a lot.  A real lot.  So that’s always a good possibility.  But it’s not like I can point that out, that maybe they “forgot.”  No question that would make my situation worse.  I’m pissed!  I ASKED them.  But showing that I’m pissed is also going to make my situation worse.  I take a deep breath, I gather all of the calm I can muster and I say in a really nice sweet gentle voice, “Dad, I’m really sorry that we seem to have gotten our signals crossed here.  I’m super sorry if you and Mom were worried, but…think for a minute.  I asked you about this party at the dinner table last week.  It must have been last Thursday, because we’d just been talking about my math test.  Remember?  I told you about the math test, and then right after I asked you about the party – because Tim had helped me study for that test, and it reminded me to ask you.”

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My father remained icily silent.

“Did you and Mom think that I just…disappeared tonight?  I would never do that!  Come on; I would never do that!  Tim’s friend picked me up, just like I’d told you he would.”

I halfway expected the steering wheel to break, what with the death grip my father had on it.  We were most of the way home before my father spoke.

“Did you really ask us?  Are you telling the truth? Because if you’re lying now, I can’t even imagine…” he said.

“Not lying.  Math test.  Time helped me ace it.  Reminded me to ask about the party,”

“You didn’t say good-bye when you left tonight,” he said.

“It’s possible.  I acknowledge that I may not have said good-bye when I left.  Am I grounded for a month for that?” I asked.

“Let me speak with your mother,” he said. “I make no promises until then. Not to mention how hard it was to even find out where you were tonight. Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, I don’t actually know Samantha real well. That’s her real name, but everyone calls her Sam. Different schools.  I know a lot of people who know her, though, like Tim and a lot of his friends.  I think they all went to the same church or something.”  OK, that was a big fat lie, and I knew it, but I thought the circumstances justified my throwing it in there, seeing as how I had been falsely accused.  I’m not a liar, generally speaking.  That’s a bad way to live. I mean, I’m a teenager, and I have parents; so, of course I lie.  But I don’t usually go out of my way my make stuff up and toss it out there.  This was different.

Bullet dodged.  I did not get grounded.

Pretty soon after that, I turned fourteen.  Tim bought me this giant, apple-scented pillar candle for my birthday.  I couldn’t believe it.  A candle.

 

 

 

Lives Darkly in my Body

In previous blog entries, I have touched on the ephemeral, ethereal phenomenon that we refer to as “inspiration,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as “The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.”

We know that inspiration can point its magic wand at the most unexpected times; still, I was taken by surprise when the recovery from my first total hip replacement last November transported me to a “place” that became the basis for the novel I am currently writing, entitled A Rocky Orchard.  Currently recovering from my second hip replacement, I have a solid start on the novel, and am thrilled to be back at work on it.

 

You lean your head towards mine.  You are going to kiss me.  How many times have you kissed me, and my stomach still does a little leap.  Your head jerks. “What was that?” you say. “What was what,” I say. I didn’t hear anything. “I definitely heard something,” you say. “You didn’t hear that?  Sounds like someone is throwing something — balls or something like that —  one after another. Listen, you say.  I hear it. Sounds like it’s getting closer, you say.  Sounds like it’s coming from the orchard.  You hear it, right? You ask me.  Yes, I hear it.

Stay here.  I’ll check it out, you say.  Probably some kid having a little fun, you say.

Don’t be silly.  I’ll come, too, I say.

The short step down from the porch, my bare foot on the hot summer grass, I am hit by a wall of humidity.  The full, fertile feel of the air that marks a Pennsylvania mountain summer. Thick, wet, ripe with a steaming, green life. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” That poem, the Pablo Neruda poem that you recited.  The humidity reminds me. Down on one knee in an old-fashioned gesture I never would have guessed.  Holding my hand and you said, “I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.” The wall of humidity pushes against me.  Your arm reaches out and you tell me to stay back.  Please, you say.  Please stay back.  “Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.”

I see him, you say.

Then I see him, too. 

I wonder what in the world he is doing here. 

Without thinking I start to call out to him.  I want to laugh.  I want to wave and ask him what in the world he is doing here.

Then I see his face.  “Lives darkly in his body.”

And I know what he is doing here.  I know.

 

Void

Another excerpt from the novel I am currently writing, tentatively titled “The Rocky Orchard.”  Also an homage to Mary Oliver, and all those who find the natural world transformative.

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The following morning, Mazie looked out the kitchen window above the sink to a dense, gray nothingness.  She filled the ancient aluminum coffee pot with cold water and strained her eyes, but the fog was pea-soup dense. That was what they called it in that neck of the woods, as Mazie recollected, and she had not seen a fog of its like in a long while. Looking out the window, she could not see to the edges of the farm house.  The walls faded and bleached into nonexistence, vanishing into the gray.  Fog as thick as this drank up all sound, except for the intermittent plops of water, the humidity so high that droplets condensed out of thin air and fell heavily to the ground.  It reminded Mazie of being in an airplane, flying through an impenetrable cloud bank, surrounded by an utter void, feeling as if she were being propelled deeper and deeper into nothing at all.

Mazie fretted that she would not be able to see the older woman when she came walking through the orchard.  Or, Mazie thought, the woman may well decide to bypass the orchard altogether, as she would not be able to see the treacherous rocks endangering her path.  In this kind of fog, people and things appeared out of nowhere, without hint or warning, when they came close enough to emerge from the fog’s grip.  They disappeared just as fast.

Mazie wrapped a light sweater around her shoulders and grabbed her coffee cup from the porch table.  She held the screen door and closed it gently behind her, barely making a sound.  The door’s usual slam seemed like it would be an intrusion into this silent, featureless world.  Mazie wandered the short distance to the near end of the orchard, where the ancient apple trees appeared out of the gray, one by one.  She ran her hand along the craggy bark, ran her finger in the grooves between the bark’s scales.

Mazie took a couple more steps into the orchard.  On one of the low-sitting but jagged rocks, she made out the faint remains of white paint.  Even in dim and fog, the old paint produced a chiaroscuro of light and dark in the deep crags.  Her father had painted a number of rocks throughout the orchard, a warning for himself and anyone else riding one of the family’s ride-on lawnmowers through the obstacle-course orchard.  Mazie was fairly sure she had never mowed the apple orchard, never wanted to try. But her father approached it as a challenge, a game, to see how fast he could go, careening around, turning sharp corners, timing himself.  She could picture him in his perennial work outfit – a plain white tee shirt and light blue pants – perched high on one of their two mowers with a whisper of a smile on his face.  He hit various rocks many, many times.  Mazie could never forget the sound.  The noisy, constant engine halting in an instant, giving way to the thunderous scrape of metal against rock that seemed to shake the surrounding woods to their core, then stop dead in abrupt silence.

One time had been different.  The metallic crash was not met by silence, but by the continued whirr of the engine and within it, the sound of her father screaming “Help!  Help me!” with panic in his voice.  On one of his daredevil sharp corners, the mower had tipped completely over, on top of him, and the blades had kept on turning.

Mazie shuddered, though her father had been fine.

She wandered back toward the house, and climbed the path to the dirt road.  Mazie looked in both directions, taking her time, in case she might see the older woman walking along the road.  She saw a slight movement at the very edge of visibility the fog would allow, but it vanished.  It may have been the woman, Mazie thought; but she could not be sure.

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top photo: Ben Woodward

Crazy Boy

I think this section from my new novel THE ROCKY ORCHARD makes an especially good flash piece.

Teenage boy with thick curly long hair blowing in the wind, serious look

Sick. I felt sick, fucking sick, when the telephone rang. I wanted to snatch the old 20-pound, rotary dial monstrosity of a phone right out of the wall and fling it through the window. I wanted glass to shatter and fly in a million directions and create rainbows of light in mid-air. I wanted the shards to rain down razors and cut the room into little ribbons. I’m too young for this, I thought. I’m fourteen years old and I am too young for this. For this shit, for this utter shit.

“Hello,” I said into the receiver.

“I’m pointing a knife at my stomach,” Tim said. “Tell me why you broke up with me.”

Suicide was just a word, a vague concept. Something whispered, read about in books. Nothing that had ever come near my own world, just a specter keeping itself hidden and far away. I had not even read The Bell Jar, hadn’t thought of Sylvia Plath turning on the stove in the apartment where she lived every day. Had not been stuck with the picture of her putting her head into the oven with the gas jet running, her two young children sleeping in their beds on the other side of the wall.

Daddy Mommy, I thought. I don’t know what Tim is going to do. I’m scared. I think he’s going to do something to himself. Help me, Daddy Mommy. I need your help, I thought.

But I didn’t say anything.   Not to my parents, not to anyone.

Tim’s younger sister, the one that was in my grade, the one that I knew, was the first one home that night.  She found him.  Still alive, but unconscious.

It’s a blur after that.  I can picture flashing lights and sirens and a lot of people and a lot of running around, but that doesn’t really make sense, does it?  They wouldn’t have been at my house; all of that would have been at Tim’s house.  Still, I have a sense of a million faces looking at me.  It seemed as if the whole world was staring at me – a vast sea of expressions.  Such concern.  Some people blamed me; I could see it in their faces.  Most people were torn, anguished even, between the part of them that wanted to stare at me, and the part of them that wanted to look away. I’d become scary to people somehow.  So many different things that people felt when they looked at me.

All I’d done was broken up with a boy.  A crazy boy.

 

Grand Canyon

grand-canyon

Here is another section from the “When I Was 4, 1960” section of my current novel.

Way before we got to the Grand Canyon, I was pretty sure my mother was just making stuff up. So by the time she was making exuberant wide gestures while talking about time, and a river, and layers of rock, and millions of years, millions and millions of years — I just felt sad and confused.  My neighbor Patsy had already told me about the whole world being made in just seven short days, well six really, cause God took one day off to rest. She had learned this at church, and this story was from God himself.  They said so at church, a Presbyterian one, but my other neighbor Carrie was an actual Catholic; and Carrie confirmed this was, without question, the truth.

I felt a little better when my brother and I were allowed to feed some peanuts to the chipmunks that were running around everywhere. I was scared they would bite me, but they didn’t, and their teeny little claws felt creepy and good all at the same time when they crawled into my hand to get the nuts.  I had to keep very, very still.  I felt like there were my personal friends.

But back in the car, as we drove away from the Grand Canyon, there was a whirl going on inside of me.  Kind of like when you make those whirly paintings at carnivals, the ones where you squirt bright, beautiful colors from ketchup bottles, and then the whole thing spins around, and you think it’s going to be so so pretty; but it’s a mess. An ugly, dark mess.

Why would my own mother tell such whoppers?

After the Grand Canyon, I was cranky, and I stayed that way the rest of the return trip, heading east once again on Route 66.  Pancakes and hotel swimming pools had lost their allure, and hours upon hours bumping along in the back seat – with nothing supposedly dazzling to look forward to – were pure torture.  After the mountains flattened out in the vast, monotonous and scorching prairie, there weren’t even any more roadside attractions to bring us to a precipitous halt.  My mother packed away her movie camera one afternoon, and the next day her regular camera, and took to staring silently out the window, turned away from all of us.  My father stopped pulling over to rest and smoke a cigarette; instead he lit up seemingly continually, sending endless clouds of choking smoke to add to our back-seat agonies.

My brother and I knew that we would get in big trouble if we fought or argued out loud, so we traversed a couple thousand miles of the United States by perpetuating a stealth war of silent punches, kicks, and the occasional pinch.  It was the only entertainment we could muster.

When we got back home, I began to secretly believe that I had been adopted, that I had come from different people entirely than these two grown-ups who ping-ponged between sphinxlike impenetrability and riotous, nonsensical laughter.  I started to have bad dreams.  In some of them, we were back on our road trip vacation, and they had left me behind at one of the endless places where we had stopped.  In others, I was trying as hard as could to run away from something awful, but my legs wouldn’t work.  It was as if I was in super slow motion, while the rest of the world – and the awful threat – came closer.  And then, I died.  For the first time.

When I Was Four, 1960

thanksgiving-station-wagons-ford-countrty-squire-trumpetMy aunt and uncle had a new baby.  She was my cousin, they said.  It was a miracle, they said, because my aunt had tried so hard to have a baby and wanted one so much.  They told me that she had lost 15 babies, which I found completely confusing but nonetheless terrifying.  How could anyone lose babies?  The idea made me feel cagey about my aunt, and I guess my mother sensed this, because she kept reminding me that I loved my aunt very much, as was evidenced by the fact that I didn’t shy away from her for even a single second when she had to stick her finger down my throat and made me upchuck because I had eaten cockroach poison.  That was during our last visit to my aunt and uncle.  I was less than two years old; I didn’t know what I was doing.  I just figured that something lying on the floor in a pretty little bowl was something I should definitely taste!  Of course, I have no memory of this myself, being so young at the time, but my mother told that story so many times that it’s like a movie that can play in my mind at the merest mention.  I can picture my aunt’s pin curls flopping in front of her eyes as she held me over the sink.  I can smell the smell of her breath combined with the fragrance of her bright lipstick as she panted with effort.  I guess I didn’t upchuck all that easily, which was all part of the story of my good nature in not holding an immense grudge against someone who hoisted me under her arm and forced her finger into the back of my throat over and over.

We finally got to California, where everything looked unreasonably bright and like the whole world had been bleached into an eerie whiteness.  It didn’t seem like it could possibly be safe to  go outside into that sea of brightness, and I even made sure to keep clear of the windows in mid-day.   My aunt and uncle had just moved into this new house and had practically no furniture, just a lot of empty, freshly-carpeted rooms and a nervous little dog that looked like he’d been given way too tight of a permanent wave for his hair.  As for the baby cousin: I’d pretty much never seen a baby before, and I wasn’t at all sure she was real.  She just sat there doing absolutely nothing most of the time.  Every so often I would pinch her, to see if she was real after all.  She would scream or cry or something, but somehow I still wasn’t entirely convinced.

station.wagon

Hope you enjoy this re-worked piece from the novel I am currently writing, tentatively titled THE ROCKY ORCHARD.

PUSHING THE RIVER

My newest novel, Pushing the River, released yesterday (Amika Press)!!

In honor of its official entrance into the world, here are some additional teaser quotes.

The early reviews have taken my breath away.  Check them out, below!

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“Madeline stood in the street and gaped into the vast cavern of space as if it were a true miracle, as if an outline of the Virgin Mother would undoubtedly appear on a side wall, like Jesus on a piece of toast.”

“That’s my heritage, the stock from whence I come, I will put on my gloves and I will get out there in that garden and I will take no prisoners and I will damn the torpedoes and I will full speed ahead.  My family is in need.”

“Madeline became passionately attached to Jeff’s body.  She scanned its surface for changes to memorize.  She took note of differing thicknesses of the hairs comprising his beard, ran her fingers alone the crevasses of scars from a bad car accident, studied the calluses on each of his fingers from years of playing guitar.”

“My head is gonna explode, she thought. It is going to detach from my body and flay apart into a million, icky-gooey-oozy little pieces.  What’s the movie where that happens?  It’s going to splatter against the walls and slap Savannah upside the face.”

“…they would be swept up in a great salty tide [of tears] and whisked down the corridor, past roomfuls of astonished new mothers cradling infants, while Madeline swooped up Dylan and saved him.”

“By the second week of December, Madeline felt as if she had fast-forwarded through a ten-year marriage in just slightly more than three months.”

“When he shuffled off to the bathroom each night to brush and floss for an absurd amount of time, it set her own teeth on edge to such a degree she felt certain her back molars would shatter into bits.”

“Sometimes it is a smell or the particular angle of the sun’s light or the sound of a door closing – some thing that makes its way through the store of life’s memories and touches something deep, far, previously lost.  In this case, it was the movement, the precise position of her legs.”

“Taking down a Christmas tree was like a death.  The death of another year.  Pack up and put away whatever was special or memorable or lasting.  Throw away the rest.”

“I knew that we were in a race against my grandmother’s remaining time.  I thought about the possibility that she might die while we were up in the clouds, and I wondered if I might be able to see her, making her trip to heaven, if I concentrated very hard on the clouds.”

“The really gory detail is how I turned out to be a hopelessly shallow person who fell for a handsome lunatic.”

https://www.goodreads.com/b…/show/41020153-pushing-the-river

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