Skeleton Leaves: Diary, 1947

By Donna Steiner

New snow on top of the old makes the yard look curvaceous, bundled-up, like a new layer of insulation batting has been laid over the bones of old architecture. In the air, glitter, flakes blowing off rooftops, snow chipping and rising off its own surface. The yard, up close, is a sheet of crystalline alphabets, a cold, alien Braille—a version that disappears if you touch it.

Sometimes, when the sun shines on freshly fallen snow, it’s hard to look outside; I find it painful to keep my eyes open. I have to squint or use my hand to shield my eyes or, more wisely, put on sunglasses. In the morning, when I check the window fresh from sleep, my glasses aren’t handy, and so I look out and see a snow-globe scene, a world of swirling, sparkling snow, sun glaring off all surfaces with an intensity that makes me turn away. Snow blindness—photokeratitis—is caused by the eyes’ exposure to ultraviolet rays reflecting off snow or ice. I’m in no danger unless I wander wide-eyed outdoors for hours without sunglasses, but I learn through a little research that if you’re ever lost in the winter wild without sunglasses, you can fashion a functional set of eyewear by cutting narrow holes in a bandana. Inuits used caribou antlers, creating goggles by carving slits in the antler and securing them to the head with sinew.

Today I’m hunkered down indoors, in need only of reading glasses, puttering around my study looking for something to occupy my thoughts or my hands or my time. While half-heartedly dusting some bookshelves, I come across a treasured gift from my grandmother, a small, leather-bound book labeled DIARY 1947. I don’t remember how it came to be mine, but I think my grandmother gave it to my mother, and when my grandmother died, my mother passed it on to me.

If my facts about my grandmother are accurate—and there are plenty of reasons to believe they may not be, including family lore about her birth certificate being altered by a priest, presumably so she could get a job at an early age—she was born in 1910, which means she was thirty-seven when she wrote in the journal. She was widowed at thirty-four, and when I first saw this book, I had hopes that I’d glean some insight into what her life had been like, how she’d coped with the sudden loss of a beloved husband, how she’d raised three children on her own. Instead, I found listings of celebrities my grandmother saw on her frequent trips to New York City from her home in New Jersey.

As I flip through the diary’s pages, I realize I’ve already made a factual error. The book didn’t belong to my grandmother, at least originally. My mother bought it for herself as a teenager. She made a few entries—very few—but one clearly says “I bought this diary today.” On March 3, 1947—a Monday—my mother went with her friend Marie and purchased a book that she intended, I surmise, to regularly write in. There are exactly five entries made by my mother. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, were made by my grandmother. I don’t know if they agreed to share the book, or if my mother lost interest and my grandmother decided to put the diary to use. My mother’s concise notations are here, in their entirety, complete with her idiosyncratic errors:

Today after school I went on the ave. With my girlfriend “Marie.” I bought this Diary Today.

“My Birthday.”

I went to my aunt’s New Year’s party. Went to bed 4: o’clock. Sleep there all night.

Today I went to New York and I saw Jimmy Stewart who was guest star on the broadcast “It Pays to Be Ignorant.”

Went to girl scouts. Met a new girl named Pat.

From these notes, all made, presumably, when my mother was about thirteen or fourteen years old, I learn she had a few noteworthy female friends. She was a Girl Scout. She was not accustomed to staying up late. She once attended a radio show featuring Jimmy Stewart. What I can’t discern is any evidence that she missed her father, that her mother or she struggled at all with his absence, that she had two younger brothers, that she ever attended school, that she liked boys, that she lived in Jersey City. There is no mention of emotion, of ambition, not even a reference to the weather. Her most common verb is “went.” She went places.

(My favorite photograph of my mother is in black and white. She’s just a girl, maybe ten years old, and she’s somberly staring out a train window, on her way to the city. She’s wearing a white dress and white anklets, and has an adorable haircut. It looks like she has a pencil case on her lap, and she appears to be deep in thought. The picture fascinates me, feels historical, weighty, relevant, like if I study it long enough I might see myself as a flickering idea in the back of my mother’s mind.)

My grandmother’s entries are numerous and her handwriting flamboyant. While my mother’s cursive style is tight and her words huddle together, my grandmother’s script has a lot of air in it, lots of curves. She pays no attention to the lines on the page and often slants her entries as though the words are climbing steeply uphill. Representative entries from my grandmother:

I went to H.R.C. to Christen my Nephew Victor. I stood up for him. We had a Delicious dinner and at night we had a party for family. Had a swell time.

Went to New York with Dorothy. Went to see Ingrid Bergman. Manager let us in. Saw Last Act of Play Joan of Lorraine. Swell.

Saw Lucille Ball. She is one swell person.

Went to New York. Saw Quick as a Flash. Saw the Shadow (great) then went to Kate Smith Show. She sang all Irish Songs. She certainly is swell.

Dot had a party. 7 girls came. Had a swell time. Made some mony. Got some nice gifts.

A few notes:

I’m not positive as to what H.R.C. stands for, but I think it’s probably Holy Rosary Church, which claims to be the “oldest Italian Roman Catholic church in New Jersey” and was just a few blocks from where my grandmother and her children lived.
Dorothy (Dot) is my mother.
During the thirty years I knew my grandmother, I never heard her use the word “swell.”
Lest one think my grandmother found everything swell, I should point out that interspersed among the more positive entries—which are the bulk of her notations—are what she calls her “crumb lists.” These are stars who did not stop and say hello, sign autographs, or even wave to their fans.
There’s no entry on my birthday. How could there be? I wouldn’t be born for twelve more years. Still, the blank page feels disturbing.
There is no entry on May 8^th, which would eventually be the date on which my grandmother died—forty-three years in the future. That, conversely, seems fitting.
At the end of the book is a page for addresses. There are seven entries: women named Marie, Catherine, Theresa, Betty Anne, Dolores, Rita, and Mrs. Prichard. There are no addresses for men.
My grandmother wrote with a fountain pen. Several fountain pens, actually, with inks in various shades of blue or black. Just a few entries are in pencil, with inked notations adjacent to them, like this:

Mary Martin (in pencil) swell person (in ink)

Both my mother and grandmother seem to have abandoned the diary after October 9^th. On that day, in 1947, they attended the premier of the play High Button Shoes, where they saw in attendance Frank and Nancy Sinatra, Danny Kaye, and Doris Day, among others. My grandmother’s assessment of the show: Very Good. I’m not sure if very good is better than swell.

(My favorite photograph of my grandmother appears to have been taken in a studio. She is wearing a white dress with dark stripes on the sleeves. It is fitted and stylish, and my grandmother—whom I knew as a short, plump, elderly woman—is slender and stunning. Around her neck are pearls and she’s wearing a trendy hat and white gloves, clutching a small purse. Her hair appears to have been done professionally. It is, in other words, a glamorous shot, dramatically different than the Polaroids and faded photographs that show her sitting in a lawn chair wearing white Keds or clustered with one or another of her sisters or grandchildren. Although she is smiling in every photograph I have and, in fact, was often laughing and was, in fact again, considered the life of any party, I can’t help but see her, in these photographs and in my memories, as lonely. Perhaps it is because she spoke, aloud, to her deceased husband every night in bed. Perhaps it is because she lived considerably longer without him than with him. Or perhaps photographs are mirrors, and I see some fundamental loneliness in her that is simply my own default nature.)

II.

Before I learned to write, I’d implore my mother to read my scribbles and tell me what they meant. I’d take a pencil or crayon and scrawl something that resembled, I thought, actual handwriting. “What does it say?” I’d ask, holding my work up to her. My mother would make up a story, tell me what I’d written, and I’d listen, rapt, impressed with my own startling creativity.

I didn’t stop there, however. I tried to read meaning into everything. During breakfast I’d take a few bites out of a slice of toast and hold it up to my mother as though the bread were a sheet of paper. “What does it say?” I’d ask.

“It says ‘I am a hungry tiger,’” my mother would respond, absent-mindedly.

Looking up at the clouds, I’d ask what they said, and she’d read me the clouds’ message. If I had scratches on my leg, I’d ask her what letters the scratches made. When my father told me stories at bedtime—stories that often featured me as the protagonist—I didn’t understand that he had made them up; I didn’t know yet what it meant to imagine. When a little girl named Donna was able to ride a flying horse in those stories, I thought it was magic not only that a horse could fly, but that in some parallel world there existed a girl with my exact name, my exact age, with a family just like mine, with long hair like mine. I wasn’t sure how my father knew about her, but I didn’t doubt the veracity of that knowledge.

I still try to unearth meaning wherever I look. Whether it is a snow-covered field, or a book written in by a woman gone for two decades, or whether it is the body of a lover that I am studying with my fingertips, I am attempting to read a text. That’s a common tendency—as is trying to find meaning in erasures, blank spots, in what isn’t said or written.

I have an envelope of “skeleton leaves,” which are made by soaking actual leaves—in this case, those of a rubber tree—in bleached water for a few weeks. After that lengthy bath, someone hand-rubs the green off the leaves. This is a delicate process, as the leaves’ veins can easily tear. I don’t know who discovered this process, or exactly why anyone does it, although it appears to be a kind of art. But a friend gave me the packet, imported from Thailand, and I love the gift. I study the skeletons with my eyes, with my fingertips, under which they feel like rough paper. Human fingers are hypersensitive; scientists believe we can detect a bump 1/25,000 of an inch high. I’m doubtful about my own sensitivity, but I can feel a leaf’s midrib and its veins, and the entire remnant is surprisingly sturdy. I could tear it, but I’d have to make an effort. Inflicting damage would be intentional rather than accidental, knowledge that allows me to study the skeletons without worry.

I have no memories of my grandmother in winter, I have no memory of her in New York City, I have no memory of her beyond being mine—my grandmother. When I picture her, the sun is always shining, she is always tan and freckled and sleeveless, her shoulders smell of Noxzema, she is laughing. I hang on to this diary the way one covets any treasure, storing it away for safekeeping, taking it out every so often, blowing dust off its leather cover. Sometimes I use the book as a kind of talisman or oracle, deciding that whatever page I open to will mean something, give me some kind of important message to live by.

Today when I open the book to look for a message, both pages are blank. But I can see through the blank pages to the writing underneath, as though looking through skin and seeing blue shadow veins beneath. It is a list of celebrities, of stars, and I can see, if I squint, the last words she wrote in her loopy, lovely penmanship: It was Swell.

•••

DONNA STEINER’s writing has been published in literary journals including Fourth Genre, Shenandoah, The Bellingham Review, The Sun, and Stone Canoe. She teaches at the State University of New York in Oswego and is a contributing writer for Hippocampus Magazine. She recently completed a nonfiction manuscript and is working on a collection of poems. A chapbook of five essays, Elements, was released by Sweet Publications.

Fear

horror — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By William Bradley

“Fear of fire, fear of lightning, fear of fire caused by lightning, fear of falling trees, and of those people who drive their cars into houses or gas stations because they confuse the brake with the gas. Once on Central Park West a man reached for my wrist as he said, “Can I ask you something?” but I didn’t let him. Fear of unasked questions that will never be answered. Fear of Rumpty-Dudget a character in a book, ‘Rumpty Dudget’s Tower,’ that I have never read, but whose worn blue spine I can sense on the bookshelf in my parents’ living room at all times, even now. Fear of women in high heels; fear of Mrs. Stein, my second grade teacher; fear of other people’s carelessness. Fear of small but deceptively sharp knives, like the Swiss Army knife that cut my brother’s finger so deep only one of my mother’s maxi-pads, with wings, could hold the blood. Fear of sirens, though only when I am driving and cannot tell where they are coming from; fear of North Korea; fear of visiting Turkey, where I was born, and not being allowed to leave. Fear that there is something really really wrong. Fear that there is nothing that can fix it.”

—A. Papatya Bucak, “I Cannot Explain My Fear”

My wife and I each paid twenty dollars to attend the one-night-only twenty-fifth anniversary screening of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street several years ago. This was at a point in our marriage where we probably couldn’t afford to blow forty dollars on a movie, but I had just started my first academic job and, for the first time, we had an annual household income of over $25,000, so we felt rich. More importantly, I love A Nightmare on Elm Street and was excited for the opportunity to see it on the big screen.

If you asked me for my favorite horror movie, I would honestly tell you that it’s The Shining. Kubrick’s use of tracking shots, Bela Bartok’s score, Shelly Duvall’s performance as an abused woman trying to survive in an icy, opulent hell—it’s all amazing and remains unnerving every time I watch it. But if I have a few beers tonight and decide I want to watch a scary movie, I’ll probably put something like Friday the 13^th Part 3 in the DVD player. You can watch it in 3D in the comfort of your own home, you know. But more importantly, I find that cheesy slasher movies from the seventies and eighties just have their own sort of goofy charm. Yes, they’re violent, and more than a little misogynist. But it’s so hard for me to take them seriously at this point. Even though they were rated R, they seem, in their simple-minded black-and-white morality, childish to me. Not of the morally complicated adult world I live in, that’s for sure. So watching movies like these reminds me of my childhood, keeps me tethered to the dorky, horror-obsessed kid I was, and—I sometimes like to imagine—keeps me young.

•••

Even before I saw my first horror movie, I found them fascinating. When I was a kid, my parents were diligent in shielding us from movie gore and anything remotely scary; the idea, I know, was to protect our impressionable minds from anything that might upset or disturb us, but I’m afraid it didn’t entirely work. In fact, as I got closer to my middle school years and realized that most of my friends had seen Halloween and Silent Night, Deadly Night, I became acutely aware that my parents had been sheltering me: there was a whole world of supernaturally-powerful serial killers and blood-thirsty demons out there. And though I understood, rationally, that these things only existed in movies, on some level I think I perceived something menacing about the adult world as a result of my parents’ zealous protection. After all, if there were nothing to really be afraid of, then why would I need to be protected?

But maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe my brother and I detected menace before becoming aware of these movies, and that’s what caused my parents to try to shield us from multiplex mayhem. I know that the witch in the Wizard of Oz scared me when I was a kid; so too did Dr. Banner’s transformation into The Incredible Hulk on TV. And my brother couldn’t stand to be in the room when The Electric Company started—the voice that yelled “Hey You Guys!” would cause him to cry if he heard it. And, truth be told, he was well into adulthood before he could force himself to watch the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the villain rips the guy’s heart out of his chest. So, perhaps my parents—realizing that their sons were high-strung and easily frightened—understood that they had to be on their toes when it came to shielding us from big-screen frights.

Or, maybe I’m over-thinking the whole thing, and responsible parents just don’t let their kids watch R-rated movies full of naked breasts and chainsaw-wielding madmen who want to turn teenagers into barbecue sandwiches.

The bottom line is, by the time I was in the fifth grade, most of my friends had seen at least some of these movies, and I had not. I was fascinated by the very idea of these forbidden movies, what they said about the adult world, and why my parents felt the need to shield me even while my friends’ parents did not feel a similar need to shield them. Plus, there was that nagging suspicion—then, as adolescence was just on the horizon—that there was something more than a little lame about not knowing anything about these movies that were so important to my classmates. I was already beginning to understand that I was a dork—a label that would stay with me at least through the beginning of high school—and part of that dorkiness came, I understood, from my naïveté when it came to these elements of the popular culture that were so important to kids in the eighties.

I found my entrance into this world of horror that my friends knew so well one morning in the cafeteria before the first bell rang to send us to our classrooms. A kid I knew, Jeremy, had a book in front of him—The Nightmares on Elm Street, the official novelization of the first three Freddy Krueger movies. The films’ logo—which looked like it had been scribbled by a madman with a nerve disorder—was splashed across the cover, with Freddy’s razor-fingered glove hanging down, blades partially obscuring the title with the blood that dripped from them.

In all of my eleven years, I had never seen a book that looked so cool.

“Good book?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Yeah. The movies are better, though.”

Of course they were, I thought. “Why are you reading the book then?”

He shrugged. “I just really liked the movies.” I think he must have intuited my interest, because he said, “I’m almost done with it. I’ll bring it tomorrow, if you want to borrow it.”

Jackpot. Jeremy had allowed me to find a loophole in my parents’ “No Horror Movie” rule. They didn’t make R-rated books, after all—and weren’t my parents always on my case about reading anyway? Even if they found the book, I could always use their previously articulated arguments in favor of literacy against them. Finally, I had won. I would learn exactly what was so scary that my parents had felt the need to protect me.

I felt certain that reading the Nightmare on Elm Street book would allow me a deeper understanding of the real world.

•••

I didn’t just read the book—I devoured it like a Romero zombie devours brains.

As I read it, I realized that books, too, could be scary. I had an imagination vivid enough to picture what it must have been like for Rod to see Tina’s sleeping body rudely lifted from the bed by an invisible force, shoved to the ceiling, and split open by unseen razor fingers. I could see Tina running from Freddy, his arms somehow long enough to stretch across the entire alley, affording her no escape. I could imagine Jesse’s dread as he came to realize that Freddy intended to possess his body in order to kill in the waking world.

The irony is, I probably would have been better off watching the movies, as far as my own fear went. When I finally saw the movies, I did find them scary, but I also realized that Rod and Tina were obnoxious and older than they should have been—they spoke the way people in their thirties think teenagers speak (“I woke up with a hard-on that had your name on it.” “Tina’s a four-letter word—your joint’s not big enough for four letters.”). The scene where Freddy chases Tina down the alley looked so fake that it made me giggle when I finally saw it for the first time. And Jesse was just an irritating whiner—if Freddy wants him so badly, let him have him, I’d later say.

But that’s not how I responded to the novelizations. No, the novelizations were simply terrifying, and—since Freddy Krueger killed kids in their sleep—I promptly resolved to never sleep again.

I didn’t actually make the decision consciously, of course. I may have had an overactive imagination and very little idea about how the real world worked, but I wasn’t an absolute moron. I knew, logically, that child murderers do not come back from the dead to haunt the dreams of the children whose parents burned them alive in their own boiler rooms. It just didn’t happen—and if it had, it would have been all over the news. No, if people could come back from the dead and hang out in people’s dreams, I was fairly certain that my grandfather would have checked in from time to time. The premise of the movies was not grounded in reality—it all came from this guy, Wes Craven, who wrote and directed the first movie. And, I could convince myself during the day, that guy probably lived in a mansion in Hollywood, surrounded by movie stars and supermodels, and hardly ever thought about this creation of his that was haunting me so.

That was my rational mind. But how many perfectly rational eleven-year-olds do you know—particularly when they’re in a dark room and the rest of the family is asleep and the house is making weird noises?

My parents realized pretty quickly that I seemed groggier than usual at breakfast, and that I was falling asleep while watching TV in the afternoon. And I eventually had to tell them that I wasn’t sleeping much at night anymore, and why. I can’t say my parents were angry with me, but nor were they particularly pleased. When all is said and done, I think the situation kind of annoyed them. “You’re not sleeping because you’re afraid that a boogeyman in a fedora hat that you read about in the adaptation to a movie you’ve never seen is going to kill you?” I don’t think that’s the type of question any father wants to ask his son.

As stupid as they surely found the situation, I have to say that my parents bent over backwards to help me to sleep again. No more drifting off in the afternoons. A big glass of warm milk before bed. God love them, at one point they even took me to our family doctor, apparently hoping that there was a pill or something that would make me forget to be such a neurotic coward. The doctor, for his part, seemed confused about what his role in this personal drama was supposed to be. “I would say,” he eventually concluded, “he needs to get over it and start sleeping again.”

Which is exactly what happened. As time passed, my terror over what I’d read faded. In a few weeks, it all seemed silly, and I was quite embarrassed by the whole episode. Scared by a movie character? How dumb. I promised myself that I would never mistake supernatural fiction for reality ever again.

I kept that promise, too. For several months. Until the USA Network showed Children of the Corn one afternoon when I was home sick, and the process repeated itself. Just as it would a year or so later when I saw Halloween for the first time. And then again with Friday the 13th. These movies terrified me as a kid, but I couldn’t stay away from them.

•••

As an adult, it’s a rare and special thing to find a horror movie that’s genuinely scary. The Shining, The Exorcist, and Alien still retain the ability to unnerve, and I’ll occasionally find an older movie, like Bob Clark’s original Black Christmas, that really freaks me out. But too much of what passes for horror these days seems watered-down, or too outlandishly stupid to be taken seriously, or just not scary. I can’t imagine anyone watching the recent A Nightmare on Elm Street remake and actually getting frightened.

Of course, part of the problem is, I’ve found new things to be scared of. As it happens, my parents were shielding me from the menacing adult world; it was just the nature of the menace that I’d misunderstood. There are no doll serial killers or leather fetishist demons with pins in their heads—instead, there are religious extremists with bombs. There are factories dumping carcinogens into streams. There are people who think a life devoted to literature and art is simply decadent. There’s waterboarding.

I fear that my writing is mediocre at best. I fear that my wife no longer finds me as physically attractive as she used to. I fear that I’ll never realize my dream of becoming a tenured professor. I fear impotence. School shootings. Stand your ground laws. Getting drunk and revealing how offensive and obnoxious my internal monologue actually is. Cancer. Being revealed as the academic and artistic fraud I’m pretty sure I am. That my parents will die. That my wife will decide she no longer loves me.

These are the things that terrify me. Sometimes, the only way to calm my nerves and quell the fear is to turn my brain off and watch a madman with a butcher’s knife stalk and then kill some babysitters.

•••

The twenty-fifth anniversary screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street was kind of a bust, actually. I had this idea that the theater would be filled with aging Gen-Xers excited to recapture the experience of being a child of the 1980s again. And there were a few of us like that in the audience. But there was also a group of about fifteen teenagers sitting down in front, and they were pretty rowdy—shouting things at the screen, giggling, running around the theater, making and receiving phone calls. My shushing got louder as the movie went on; a woman roughly my age sitting nearby eventually shouted at the kids, “Shut the fuck up!”

“This is ridiculous,” I kept whispering to my wife.

“Do you want to go complain?” was her constant reply.

I didn’t. I didn’t want to be the type of person who gets annoyed with young people. I didn’t want to be someone who gets angry at the sound of teenagers laughing. I hated the idea that I was the type of grumpy old man who said things like “Get off my lawn!” or who had groups of teenagers thrown out of places because of shenanigans and tomfoolery.

Towards the end of the movie, as Nancy is setting her traps for Freddy, one of the teenage girls came walking up the aisle, gabbing into her phone.

“Oh I know,” she said, “it’s soooooo stupid, but funny…”

As she walked past me, I leaned towards the aisle and shushed her as loud as I could.

She stopped and adjusted the phone so that it wasn’t near her mouth. I was expecting her to whisper “Sorry,” but instead she looked right at me and shouted, “Shut up!”

I was shocked, startled both by her viciousness and the phrase that entered my head immediately: “My God, I would never have spoken that way to an adult when I was her age.”

When I was her age. Back in the day. The good old days? The grown-ups I knew when I was a kid didn’t think so—they thought we were out of control, with crack cocaine, gangs, drive-by shootings, casual sex, and N.W.A. Of course, their parents thought they were out of control, with their LSD, free love, campus protests, left-wing radicals, and The Beatles.

Unexpectedly, I did experience fear that night—the fear that comes from knowing that, somewhere along the line, you became old without realizing it, and you’ll never know the reckless energy of youth again.

•••

WILLIAM BRADLEY’s work has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including Utne Reader, The Normal School, The Bellevue Literary Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and The Missouri Review. This is his second essay for Full Grown People. He lives in Canton, New York, where he teaches at St. Lawrence University, and he has recently completed a collection of essays that link to form an unconventional memoir about love, loss, and pop culture obsessions. He also recently found a very cheap used copy of The Nightmares on Elm Street novelization, which he thinks he might re-read this summer. He’ll let you know if he ever sleeps again.

The Rest of the Story

By Lee Gulyas

My first date with the man who would become my husband was a disaster.

It was August, and the San Francisco fog rolled across Ghirardelli Square where we both worked selling things to tourists. As we walked, I noticed Ed had a slight limp, and in that optimistic way of seeing one thing connected to everything else, I thought about my friend who had just sprained his ankle and asked my date if he had sprained his.

“No,” Ed said. “I have a fake leg,” as he tilted his head and gave me a smile, leading me to think he was toying with me.

“Yeah, sure. That’s a good one,” I said, not about to let him, or anyone, play me for a fool.

We drove for coffee in the Mission, away from the water and fog, past the War Memorial Opera House, past the fortune cookie factory and into the sun. Light streamed onto our table and illuminated the twisted branches of the sidewalk trees, sad dogs on leashes, motes of dust revolving in the air. Ed talked about folk art, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Hungarian food. I told him about my love for classical music and punk rock. He didn’t blink, didn’t think the two were incompatible. After a moment of silence, I motioned to his leg and asked how it happened. “My friend shot it off when I was thirteen,” he said, smiling.

“Great, great,” I said, always the cynic. “Do you tell everyone the same story?”

After coffee, we agreed on dinner and more conversation. We talked about landscape and trains and music and literature as the sun disappeared and lights framed the city skyline. I lingered over my calzone and asked him to tell me more. “We were camping in the middle of the desert and my friend got the gun out of the truck and it just went off.” He flashed the same, sly smile, and his eyes gleamed.

“Wow,” I said. “Your story just keeps getting better. You’re really good at this.”

We decided to go for drinks. I took him to a dive bar close to my apartment. He was impressed with the extensive taxidermy, year-round Christmas decorations, dim lighting, and ample margaritas. I selected music on the jukebox—Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Ranchera. We sat on red vinyl-covered swivel stools and sipped drinks under the glow of Christmas lights draped over deer antlers. After a few drinks, we planned for a weekend hike on Mt. Tamalpais.

Later, while I described the mechanical beauty of vintage Italian motorcycles, Ed sat his drink on the bar, leaned over, raised his pant leg, pulled up his sock, and stuck it to the Velcro square on his hard, plastic leg.

I remember my stomach turning, growing tight. I felt queasy and it wasn’t the margaritas. I don’t remember the rest of the evening, what was said, how we parted. What I do know is that at the age of twenty-five, for the first time in my life, I called my mom to talk about a man. After blurting out the story, panicked that I couldn’t go hiking with him, that I’d made such an ass of myself, she set me straight. “It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

How could I argue with that?

•••

I’ve never been known for my social grace, yet this blunder had my head spinning. I didn’t want to face Ed after spending the whole afternoon, evening, and night making fun of him, but I couldn’t figure a way out of our next date without making myself look worse. The awful thing was that I was falling for him, and it had seemed so long since this was possible. San Francisco in the eighties was a playground full of sex, drugs, and music, and I had played for years until my circle of friends became smaller (and more responsible). The party was winding down. We no longer danced till four a.m., heading out for breakfast after, tearing through the streets on motorcycles to get home to our beds before the sun came up. Now we worked at our jobs or went to school and met for breakfast on Saturday mornings. I hadn’t been on a date in years, but I was content enough with my job and my friends that being “dateless” didn’t bother me. And I never thought that I was missing anything until the possibility of missing my next encounter with this man outweighed any chance for the salvation of my pride.

The next day was sun and shadow, redwoods and ferns. I wondered if I should say something—apologize for my disbelief, my arrogance—but at first there didn’t seem to be a good time, and as the day went on an apology seemed irrelevant. We sat on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream. We feasted on pistachios and dried figs, listened to woodpeckers and ravens. We scrambled up hills and down ravines, stood above the fog line and peered across to San Francisco.

At the end of the day when his car stopped in front of my apartment, Ed leaned over, stared into my eyes and asked, “Can I do something?” I nodded tentatively and he reached around to the back of my head and took my unruly hair into his hand. He lingered, then let go.

In the coming weeks we walked all over the city to restaurants, movies, and cafés. At Point Reyes, we hiked two miles with full gear in the blue moonlight and made camp on a bluff overlooking the ocean. On a weekend trip to Squaw Valley, he taught me how to downhill ski and never laughed, even after the chair lift knocked me down. We backpacked our way through steep canyons and valleys in the Southwest, swam in cold, spring fed waters in Oak Creek Canyon. I was in new territory—I usually spent my time in restaurants and bars and my idea of outdoors activities took place on a motorcycle. Still, I was hesitant about Ed’s handicap, uncertain of how his disability could change my life.

•••

I couldn’t figure out exactly what I was afraid of. It wasn’t that his prosthesis was limiting—he was way more active and daring than I was. It certainly wasn’t the idea of disability—my aunt had polio, my dad had a permanent tracheostomy, and I have friends with a range of conditions and array of medical apparatuses. So what was my problem?

That’s when I realized that I was my problem. I wasn’t afraid he would need me. I like being needed. I was afraid that I would need him.

•••

It took years for my husband to tell me the rest of the story. How his leg blew open in front of him, how his friend’s father threw him in the back of the truck and drove like hell to the nearest hospital, miles away over rough desert roads. How he waited in the emergency room for hours while the hospital tried to locate his parents so they could authorize emergency treatment, so the doctors could do more than just resuscitate him each time he slipped away. How he spent months in the hospital enduring surgery after surgery, taking away more of his limb because of the spreading gangrene. How a young resident told him to leave the hospital, that he had been allergic to the antibiotic, but the attending doctor wouldn’t even consider allergic reaction a possibility. How leaving the hospital not only saved what was left of his leg, but also saved his life.

Over twenty years later I won’t lie. I won’t say that Ed’s leg has been problem free. Since he is active he often breaks his prosthetic foot. The costly legs have to be replaced every few years, the silicone liners every few months, and insurance doesn’t always cover the expenses. There are times when his skin gets irritated or chafed and then he can’t wear the leg at all. He’s undergone corrective surgery that required him to stay off his leg completely for two months straight—no prosthesis, no walking, no driving. He suffers from back problems; there are days at a time when all he can do is take muscle relaxants and lie flat on his back until the pain subsides. Then there’s the frustration and subsequent depression, a symptom of all the imposed inactivity. He experiences chronic pain, not phantom ones, though he gets those too. But he rarely asks for help; he hates being immobile, reliant on others for his basic needs.

Ed seldom slows down unless he has to. We visit relatives in Hungary. We’ve trekked through rural Mexico, traveled through Romania and Ethiopia, and lived in Yemen—all difficult places to get around. He gardens, bikes, swims, and has a long list of interests and projects, too many for me to keep track of. I’m content in the house, with a book. Ed’s the one that makes me get off the couch and out into the world.

Now he jokes that I married him for the parking space. I laugh, but I have to admit that it is convenient. The state we live in calls the rectangular blue placard that hangs from our rearview mirror “a privilege.” I see it as a courtesy, a small gesture that can only help make this single aspect of his life a little easier.

In the meantime, we’re proof that normal is relative. Sometimes our daughter, now a teenager, has to be reminded why we often can’t go skiing or for a hike, or why we get directed to the front of a crowded parking lot at Disneyland or the fair.

Sometimes I forget too, even though I know my future will include a long parade of orthopedic surgeons, dermatologists, prosthetists, physical therapists, and the accompanying bills. We’ll have to move from our cozy Victorian home to a more practical one-story house, ready for wheelchairs, accessible design, and all the accoutrements of “independent living,” even though there is no such thing, even though in the end it could be me who has to rely upon Ed for care. I suppose this is the rest of the story: nothing is certain—so we go forward the best way we know how.

•••

LEE GULYAS lives in Bellingham, Washington, and teaches at Western Washington University. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in such journals as Prime Number, Event, Barn Owl Review, and The Common.

Autobiographies

bar stools — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jill Talbot

When I was in second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Croft, had us write an autobiography. She told us to add our address at the bottom, then roll it up, and tie it to a red balloon. That way, she said, someone might find it and write back. After lunch, we walked out to the large field by the school with our balloons in hand. At Mrs. Croft’s count of three, we let them go. I can still see those red balloons floating up and away. I watched mine until I could no longer see it in the sky.

•••

Thirty years later, I entered a rehabilitation facility outside Salt Lake City, Utah. We called it The Ridge. After a four-day medical detox that turned most of us into sleeping lumps beneath blankets in dark rooms, our first task was to write our autobiography detailing how we got there. The autobiographies were our way of coming clean, so to speak. They told us that if we didn’t work through whatever instigated our addiction, we’d go right back to the bottle, the pipe, the pills. They called it “cognitive therapy”: Read and Write Your Way to a Sober New You. To most of the people in The Ridge, a writing assignment was punishment, so it came with a privilege: to go outside. This was enough motivation for most, as the only chance we had to step outside was during the two thirty minute breaks we got between meetings that began every day at 7:15 a.m. and lasted until 9:00 p.m. And even then we were supervised.

I had been writing and publishing essays for years and even had a job at a university in the southern part of the state teaching students how to write them, but it wasn’t until I went to The Ridge that I learned to stop hiding behind my own lies.

Since we were separated into groups by counselor, I didn’t get to hear everyone’s autobiographies, so in the evenings, I’d sit on one of the couches in the TV lounge and read the ones I’d missed. It was like being in a workshop, but one in which no one thought about the writing. The words were confessing. The words were admitting. And it made the writing immediate, raw, real. Years later, I’d teach an introductory course in the personal essay to a class of science majors who, until that class, didn’t know the genre existed. Their writing reminded me of those rehab essays—the lack of self-consciousness, the art they had no idea they were creating.

•••

No one in that place but me and one other guy had been to college. I don’t count a college dean because she only lasted two days. Maybe she was too ashamed to stay. Maybe she couldn’t do without her Vicodin. Most of the patients were railroad workers, farmers, or affluent, bored wives. Most had no job at all—the booze or the crystal meth made sure of that. The only patients who read on a regular basis were me and a twenty-two-year-old bartender.

The bartender woke up in the hospital and was told that he had passed out with a gun in his hand, a plan voided by a pint of vodka. Lanky, dark-hair, droopy brown eyes, now he’d be described as James Franco-esque, but then, he was the guy who liked to read. David Sedaris, Chuck Palahniuk, James Frey. He’d finish one, bring it down to my room. The small lounge across from the nurse’s station had a bookcase, loosely filled with mostly self-help and Michael Crichton, John Grisham, and one surprising Joyce Carol Oates, so his girlfriend brought our requested copies twice a week: Cormac McCarthy, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, because we both appreciated irony.

But we were there to write our own stories, detail every last drunk and destruction, the damages that had led us to the same exact spot, even on the same day, when we’d sat on a bench in early December, me drunk, him discharged from the hospital. That day, I’d stepped behind a glass door, then turned back once more in hopes that I could be let out, that it was all someone else’s narrative. He’d been locked up behind a steel door after his shoelaces and the string inside the waistband had been confiscated. His drinking had come on fast, his reluctance toward his intellect its trigger, his final insistence on an artistic portrait of the disgruntled young man, a bottle of vodka, and a gun stolen from behind the bar. He’d woken up angry, embarrassed, feeling like he was living the life he had failed to end.

The last I heard, he went back to the bar for the afternoon shift, hoping, like some guy out of Hemingway story, that it wouldn’t be as hard in the daylight.

•••

One of the meth addicts had become so paranoid he moved into his workshop behind his house. He’d peek through the blinds, watching his wife and two teenage sons as they came and went from the grocery store, school. Then he had watched them move out.

•••

My counselor’s last words to me on the day I checked out: “You don’t have to be Hemingway to be a writer. You don’t have to be drunk or be sad.”

•••

They’d often tell us that the sobriety rate for people leaving rehab was ten percent, so that out of the thirty or so of us in there at any given time, three would stay sober. The rest of us would go back to drinking or drugs, or we would eventually develop some cross addiction. If we had been drinkers, we might turn to pills. Or pills might be replaced by cocaine. Cocaine by booze. It’s a trick addicts play on themselves, they’d say, kicking a habit while forming a new one. They’d also warn that if we kept doing what we had been doing, we’d be dead. Some of us soon, because we had already done so much damage that “one more drink” would be too many.

What I had been doing was drinking Chardonnay, as early as ten in the morning on some days and as late as three in the morning some nights. I had loved a man for years who suddenly left me, who left our daughter, Indie, when she was four and a half months old. He abandoned us. But I abandoned us, too. I drank myself away from Indie, from myself, from the life she and I had together.

•••

A blackjack dealer had worked downtown Las Vegas at the Four Queens during its opening years, her cans of Bud and a Camel as quick as the cards. The doctors said her liver was in pieces, shards, really.

Most of the time, she slept in her room, a vaporizer belching loudly beside her bed at all hours, her door propped open, the room dark even in the day, her frailty a shadow beneath intricate afghans and a green sleeping bag. She wasn’t strong enough to walk, so we took turns bringing her meals on trays or holding her arm as she shuffled to the TV room. Once, someone found her on the smoking patio, her fingers fumbling to light a cigarette. Such futility, no more damage to be done. She was not well enough to attend sessions on schedule, and when she did, her head lolled to the side in sleep, her body bundled in that purple robe. She never wrote her autobiography. Either she couldn’t remember it or it didn’t matter anymore. When the coughs smothered her, we’d all look down at the floor or our notebooks, offering her the only form of privacy possible in a circle of people who saw her as a cautionary tale. At sixty, she looked eighty. Her raspiness, her weightlessness an ugly whisper from a fast life that not one of us envied.

She had been there at the beginning, she said, one of the invisibles shuffling blind under the blinks of the casino lights. “I kept a can of Bud right there at the table,” she told me once. We regretted it for her, all of it.

The last I heard, her husband showed up, belligerent, demanding to know just how long she had been there before taking her home.

•••

Being locked up in the rooms of a rehab facility for twenty-eight days, certain phrases got repeated until they were just noise, a skipping record: “Fake it ’til you make it.” “It works if you work it.” “Work as hard for your recovery as you did for your addiction.” “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” The head counselor’s favorite: “Don’t sympathize. Empathize.” He’d explain, at least once a day, that when people read their autobiographies or shared in a meeting, we were not to feel sorry for the person. We were to understand, to share the experience, to not distance ourselves with pity. The stories we heard were ours. Or they would be if we weren’t careful.

•••

A man checked out. He showed up two days later on the bench by the nurse’s station. He had been badly beaten, or worse. Someone whispered about a liter of whiskey, a night in the ER, but we never got to ask him. They locked him up in the psych ward.

One guy who left The Ridge on the day I arrived hung himself a week later.

For my roommate, it took only two days before a bender ended with a mess of police cars in the front yard of her Park City home. Before The Ridge, she had done two stints at Betty Ford.

One man died within a month. Sober. He died from all the drinking he had already done.

One man disappeared.

I went back to the university where I had been teaching and made it to the end of the spring semester before I drove to the next town, got a hotel room, then spent the rest of the evening at the bar, convinced that if I didn’t drink at home it didn’t count. It wasn’t a cross addiction; it was cross location. It was fucked up.

•••

One of the railroad men had snorted coke on the long runs in the middle of the night. He chewed on plastic flossers during meetings and wore a University of Texas baseball cap backwards, even though he was fifty.

One night, I sat with him alone in the room where we usually played Scattergories. The room had one window, an elongated table, worn plastic chairs, a closet with extra blankets and plastic sheets. He was stuck at Step 1, the autobiography phase, staring for weeks at a blank page and a pen that would not take his disappointment, the guilt. So I sat across from him and asked questions about his ex-wife, the worst nights, their recent phone exchanges, and I wrote it all down. I asked until he had no more answers, so I started writing the questions then pushed the yellow legal pad across the table. I ducked out of the room, leaving him to stare at the vocabulary of his failings.

He claimed to be friends with a famous author, a woman who, according to him, had a framed picture of his chest x-ray prominently displayed in her living room next to a couple of hanging plants. He liked to draw spirals on the pages of my notebook during meetings. Once, during a session on dream analysis, he told about standing in the middle of a diving board. The psychiatrist on staff preferred Jung and told him that the board was an archetypal symbol of both risk and abandon. After we both left, we spoke on the phone once, me in my kitchen in Utah, he on his cell phone on a rail car somewhere across Oregon. The last I heard was his message on my voice mail: “I’m going to die here, but not before I see you first.”

•••

A train track ran adjacent to the hospital. I’d stand on that porch, watching the lights of the passing cars, and think about scaling the wall and hopping one. One night during a smoke break, one of the psychiatrists came out to the patio looking for me. He said he wanted to meet the Ph.D. who drank a gallon of wine every night. “You,” he said, slapping my back, “are a legend.” I said thank you, crushed out my cigarette, and walked back inside.

•••

Every morning after breakfast, we’d line up at the nurses’ station for our meds and blood pressure check. In the afternoon, we’d do it again. The girl who cut herself was on an antipsychotic drug. The hay farmer cussed and called everyone a “yahoo” before they took him off Prozac. After a weekend pass to visit her son at home, my roommate returned sedate and peaceful, nothing like the weeping, neurotic beauty she had been in the three weeks I knew her. Once when she was out of the room, I opened the top drawer of her nightstand and found three pill bottles and a cell phone. Contraband. I kept her secret and allowed the counselors to believe “she finally got it.” One woman was on something that made her so drowsy she couldn’t stay awake during meetings, which was a rule breaker. And the nineteen-year-old who had been sleeping in the backs of cars on the streets of Salt Lake City tried to charm the staff into giving him “something more.” I stepped up to the window and looked down at the tray. The nurse held a white cup with two red capsules. I asked if I could stop taking them. She said she’d bring it up at the staff meeting. “Not a chance,” my counselor told me.

•••

“All of us,” Montaigne wrote, “have within us the entire human condition.” At The Ridge, they called them “autobiographies.” Montaigne called them essais. In other words, attempts. Sit down and write how you got here. Try to figure it out.

•••

I don’t remember if any of the students in Mrs. Croft’s 1977 second grade class ever received a letter from our balloon assignment. The balloons probably ended up popped or wilted, found by a stranger who had no idea that there had been words. Most likely in the panhandle of West Texas, they drifted into the middle of some field where the blades of a tractor shredded them. I kept all the pages I wrote from rehab. The fourteen pages of my autobiography, front and back, the notebook pages framed in spirals, and the pages from the Vietnam Vet.

He had worked the rail yards in Portland for seventeen years. He was heavyset, always in jeans and a shirt that struggled around his middle. When he sat down, he’d pull at it, this way and that, trying to get comfortable. He had gotten sober before and it stuck for thirteen years until he took some “stuff that blew his head off.” He often fell into coughing fits during meetings and had to step outside for a drink of water, which was also against the rules. He’d shuffle back in, apologize, shake his head at his inability to get through an hour without breaking down. He had dropped out of school. Listening to him read was like watching a man dare the frail of a rope bridge.

On one of the last days he was there, he came to the door of the TV lounge and asked if I’d help him with something. We went out to the smoking porch where he pulled out a form and asked me to write down what he told me. He pointed to the four lines provided beneath the section: Addiction History. “Began using alcohol at the age of fifteen. Pot usage. Meth. Went to AA but stopped going to meetings. Thirteen years of sobriety. Relapse. Three years without alcohol. Came to The Ridge.” I pushed the form across the table. He looked at the words as if they were details in a photograph he couldn’t quite make out.

On his last day, he showed me to two chairs in the hallway outside his room. He said he wanted me to have something he had written. His counselor, also a Vietnam Vet, had given him a final writing assignment, one he didn’t have to read aloud. He handed each one to me, in order, and while he sat with his arms folded and his head down, I sat in the chair next to them and read:

What Joe Lovett Like?

Joe Lovett was a yung idao spud. One hell of a grate guy that we called Spud. All he coughed is talk about Betty. He love to smoke pot and drink beer and stair at Bett pitchers. She was a pairty littal thing. He love to cut trees down with his fifty calorber gun. But we all now he didn’t get to go home. He was the first of the three to be shot in the head. I will always remember him like a brother. God Bless him. He was bless of “19” of his life.

What Was Mike Stratton Like?

Mike Stratton was big boy. He look lik he cought cut trees down with two chops. But he was one big tedy bear. We all called he Miky. Miky was from Orchers Washington. He was ok until we got him riped. He cought of hurt any one of us when he was riped and in a rage. I got know Miky for only “26” days. He was number two of three to be shot in the head. In the short time I got to know him I loved him like he was my brother. Now I know whey we were num all the time we were there. We all tried not to think about it. Like Spud Miky was bless with “19 years of life. I will never for get them. They will always be in my hart and in my prairs. God Bless Them.

What Was John Bires Like?

John Bires was a nice guy. He wought have given you any thing. He was from New York. One of those guy that talk funny. He loved to smoke pot. Then he wought eat every thing. You think he talk funny. When he was riped he talked every funnier. I got know him longer than Spud or Miky. For fun we called him JB. Have you ever hered some one from New York called JB. JB loved to play cards. He won a lot of the time. I hated to play cards with him. He always took my money. I got to know JB longer than Spud or Miky. JB was there for two months. JB was three of three to die. JB also was shot in the head. But this time his head landed in my lap. I just sat there with his head bleeding in my lap. I felt like I wasn’t there. I will never foget them. I wil have them always in my hart. May God Bless them all my Brother.

•••

It seems strange to feel inferior to someone’s pain, to the levels of their addiction, but I always I felt as if I hadn’t done near enough to be locked up with the others. I hadn’t lost my daughter. Or my home. Or my job. I hadn’t lived on the streets. Or gone to jail. I didn’t even have a DUI, which seemed to be a prerequisite. Hearing such autobiographies made me feel one of two ways: Either I had no reason to drink, or I hadn’t gone far enough with my drinking. I worried I was destined to return. Maybe it would take two years, or five, and I’d be back in the circle, reading a much more disturbing autobiography than Sunday morning Chardonnay.

•••

Another thing: they always told us we wouldn’t stay in touch. We didn’t believe them. I didn’t believe them. I was wrong. I have no idea where any of those people are—if they’re sober, if they’re alive.

Once we left The Ridge, we were like balloons released into the air.

•••

JILL TALBOT is the author of a memoir, Loaded, as well as the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction . Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Brevity, DIAGRAM, Hobart, The Paris Review Daily, The Pinch, and The Rumpus. She is the 2013–2015 Elma Stuckey Writer-in-Residence in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago.

Under the Bed and Dreaming at Hillside House

reader — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jennifer James

About thirteen years ago, my husband’s grandmother, Miss Elizabeth, was moved to an assisted care facility. Initially, it seemed surprisingly nifty. There were big screen televisions, prepared meals, and lots of friendly staff members. Except for the occasional funky smell and confused outburst, it felt a lot like a geriatric college dormitory setting. This was a happy surprise—I had anticipated grungy green walls, stained linoleum floors, and rows of abandoned bodies anchored to wheelchairs. Instead, I walked into an open, airy atrium, decorated with large, luxurious Boston ferns and a spacious bird cage, home to a few brightly colored finches. Two cheerful ladies sporting tight perms and meticulously coordinated track suits greeted me as I stopped to look more closely at the finches. I was not crippled by sadness, walking into this place: a genuine blessing under the circumstances.

All kinds of folks landed at Hillside House, as I’ll call the facility. Elizabeth had been diagnosed with some nasty “female” (it was, in fact, uterine) cancer six months earlier. She had most likely been ill for some time before the cancer had been detected, but she had ignored some symptoms, assisted by well-intentioned physicians along the way. By the time her illness was acknowledged and diagnosed, it was statistically unlikely that Elizabeth would recover. Her treatment plan was labeled “palliative,” designed to give maximum comfort and healing without subjecting her to rigorous procedures and quasi-lethal medications. Reluctantly, the family agreed that she could no longer live independently and Hillside House seemed the least-terrible option available. Which didn’t make it any less terrible for Elizabeth.

•••

When I first met Elizabeth, she was in her late fifties and I was engaged to her grandson, Ed. Ed and I had met in college, fallen quickly and completely in love, and caused our parents all kinds of consternation as a result. Especially Ed’s parents. My parents were divorced and disorganized and fairly unconcerned with societal expectations and judgments. Sure, they hoped Ed was not secretly a serial killer with a collection of severed Barbie doll heads under his bed, but he seemed respectable enough, with his gentle Southern accent and aspirations to become a high school English teacher. On the scale of crazy in our family, he was hardly a blip on the screen.

Ed had grown up in a small, rural community, where your life was fodder for community review sessions, courtesy of your friends, neighbors, and your very own respectable family members. What they knew was this: I had not been raised in Virginia, my (ahem…divorced) parents were both Yankees, and I had been baptized in the Catholic (aka “Papist”) church. I could have come with more familiar credentials, and certainly, a more civilized bloodline.

Still, Ed seemed to like me fine, and that was good enough for Elizabeth: she fed me right along with the rest of the family. Ed grew up three miles down the road from his grandparents and spent many happy days eating freshly fried chicken and as many ice cream sandwiches as he could manage at their kitchen table. Elizabeth didn’t talk about how she felt, or how you felt, or what was wrong with the world today; she was busy putting more potatoes on your plate and checking to see if you needed more chicken. She was a pragmatist, by necessity—dreamers in her time didn’t have a great survival rate. After all, there was too much work to do: there were parents, and grandparents, and if you were very, very lucky, children, to care for. Elizabeth did what was expected of her: she tucked her own dreams away and nurtured those of her children.

And Elizabeth loved children. She taught them handwriting and prayers and how to slaughter a chicken neatly. She fried piles and piles of salt fish and potatoes at four-thirty a.m. on winter mornings so “the boys” (she’d had two, three counting her husband) would have a good breakfast before they set out hunting. Both of her sons married spirited women who may have wanted their husbands home on chilly winter mornings, and as the years passed, Elizabeth found herself preparing fewer and fewer early-morning fish feasts.

When I came to the family, Elizabeth and I developed a heartfelt, if timid, affection for one another. We didn’t really speak one another’s language, but eventually I learned to shift my conversation to weather predictions and local news, and she learned that I was not judging her on the tenderness of her chicken or the tartness of her fig preserves. We became allies in the muddy world of multi-generational family allegiances, and by the time Elizabeth became a resident of Hillside House, she was much more like my own grandmother than any kind of in-law.

About three months before Elizabeth got sick enough for anyone to notice, I learned I was pregnant with my first child. This was a considerable relief to everyone involved. Initially, our families feared that our lickety-split trip to the altar indicated that a “six month” baby was on the way. After a year, there was no baby. Several years passed, in fact, with no baby, and family members began to wonder whether we were incapable of reproducing or just too selfish. Ed and I kind of wondered ourselves, so when we learned a wee one was on the way, we leaned into the future with happy resignation and notified our parents and grandparents accordingly. The ensuing excitement was tinged with achy sorrow as Elizabeth’s illness unfolded parallel to my pregnancy.

•••

So there we were: Elizabeth, wondering how she’d ended up in this silly establishment full of old people and food without nearly enough seasoning, and me, wondering kind of the same thing.

One afternoon, as we sat in a sunny spot on the back terrace, a tiny, hunched-over woman who I’ll call Miss Emily shuffled by. As she went back in, she threw us an accusing look, as if we’d just pelted her car with raw eggs or something like that.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “Are we sitting at her table?”

Elizabeth snorted, coughing a little in the process. “Aw, don’t worry about her. She’s always on a tear.”

“Why?”

“I don’t rightly know, honey. She won’t talk to anybody. She just rushes around here like somebody’s after her.” Elizabeth sipped her chamomile tea. “It sure is aggravating, I’ll tell you that.”

I saw her point.

•••

A few weeks later, Hillside House had become much more familiar to me. It felt less like a college dormitory, and more like the set for an episode of The Twilight Zone. At first, everything had seemed pretty normal. Which I guess it was, since aging and death are normal realities. Still, it’s outside the norm to find a whole building purposed for housing folks in this chapter of life, and there was a certain sensibility that colored the residents and their visitors accordingly.

For example, we’d gotten used to a woman I’ll call Miss Agnes, who sat on the loveseat in the corner, singing, “I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready for my ice cream.” Sometimes she got a little pissed and sang louder, in a growly tenor: “I’m READY. READY. READY FOR ICE CREAM.” And so on. The nursing assistants spoke to Miss Agnes gently, and would sometimes guide her to the next activity or simply let her chant the day away, dreaming of ice cream.

One afternoon, Miss Emily skittered by the periphery of the room we were sitting in, and I asked Elizabeth if she had heard anything that might account for Miss Emily’s strange behavior

“Oh, honey,” Elizabeth sighed. “Miss Emily is nuttier than one of Grandma Sutton’s date bars.” That much I knew.

This was her story:

Miss Emily was a book thief. Since her first day at Hillside House, she’d been collecting printed materials. She started with a stash of brochures at the front desk and soon moved on to the large print Reader’s Digest magazines. Because she only took a few at a time, nobody noticed at first. God knows, no one ever saw the woman sitting, much less settled in with a good book. Two or three weeks into her residency, however, Miss Emily’s secret was uncovered. The staff tried to keep the old lady relatively happy, while quietly culling her print collection from time to time.

I was impressed. I wasn’t sure I’d be innovative enough to snatch reading materials like that.

Elizabeth let out a very soft harrumph and said, “Well, Jenny, I don’t know what in the world that crazy old woman is thinking. What is she going to do with all those foolish books anyway?” I said nothing in response, but thought I knew exactly what “that crazy old woman” was thinking. Exactly. And I tried not to hold it against Elizabeth.

•••

Books are not a nicety for me; they’re a necessity. Books have always been my friends. There were long periods of time in my childhood when I was surrounded by lots of unhappy adults and books and not much else. The books made excellent allies, even the duller ones. Also, since the adults involved were pretty busy being miserable, they didn’t have too much energy to squander policing my reading selections. I learned a lot about sex (a few choice scenes from Peter Benchley and Ken Follett) and frontier living (Laura Ingalls Wilder) and deeply disturbed loners (Edgar Allen Poe) at a tender age.

As I grew older, and mercifully, gained access to a broader selection of books, I glommed onto young adult fiction. At a certain point in time, I probably could have recited full chapters of Judy Blume books from memory. I loved a book called The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger. I am still moved to tears by Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light. The clueless (if loving and well-intentioned) adults in my life had very few helpful pointers for a chunky teen with poor social skills. If Judy Blume couldn’t teach me how to talk to boys, who could? Who would?

In the end, if you’re a reader, it doesn’t seem to matter so very much what you read. There is magic in seeing the world from another point of view, regardless of whose it is. And yet, there are some people who never quite get the magic. Elizabeth was one of those people. She read when obligated, but reading held no special pleasure for her. Maybe it correlates with the “no dreaming” environment she survived; her life had been shoved into external experience. Reading was an activity only the idle could afford, and she was too busy making sure that everyone was equipped with clean undies to read some trifling book. And hell, who really knows what batty Miss Emily was up to? Maybe she was just an elderly hoarder. She never said.

I like to think she read everything she took, though. Especially the Reader’s Digest. When it’s me, sitting in the determinedly cheerful atrium of Hillside House or Young at Heart, or wherever I end up in my final days, I hope I’ll have books to read, and I hope they’ll be my books, and not crappy little fliers and magazines stashed around the assisted care facility. I can see the fun in skittering around and snatching things too, though. It doesn’t matter if you call it a nursing home or an “assisted care facility” or the geezer house. What it means is, you can’t live by yourself anymore. Because you’re too old or too sick. And the next benchmark is not a new car or Hawaiian vacation. Even the crazy lady singing for ice cream had to know that. So you might as well enjoy the ice cream and read everything you can.

•••

I never did talk to Miss Emily, and Elizabeth lived for ten whole days after our baby was born. On the way home from the hospital, we stopped by Hillside House to introduce our new boy to Elizabeth. It was quite an event. Elizabeth was very sick by then, and spent her days drifting in and out of awareness.

Ed and I walked into the familiar atrium with the baby, hope and despair in equal measure bubbling around in our hearts. The old ladies gathered around to coo at the little one and to give us hugs. I was sobbing before we even got to Elizabeth’s room. The rush of raw joy and sadness coexisting made everything seem so terribly fragile.

We walked into her room. One of her sons sat beside her bed, holding her hand and quietly weeping. My husband and I sat down on the other side of the bed and she shifted her head slightly so she could see us.

“Oh, Jenny,” she said softly. “He’s just darlin’.” Then she managed a wink and a tiny chuckle. “Little boys are the best, you know.”

She was too weak to actually take the baby in her arms for long, but I put his tiny body down in the crook of her arm and he stayed like that for a minute or two. Then the spell broke and the baby cried and we had to leave.

We saw her one more time after that and the baby cried from the first moment we walked in. Finally, someone took the baby into another room, and Elizabeth took my hand.

“Jenny. Jenny, do you think I’m dying? Do you?”

In general, I like to think I’m okay being near very ill people. I think it’s because I am gifted in the finest nuances of denial and can carry on a quasi-normal conversation with the dying. I can discuss the weather, their medication, other family members, etc., etc. The problem is, I don’t want to scare the dying person. If they don’t know they’re dying, I don’t want to be the one to break the news.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I think that’s between you and God, Elizabeth. I don’t know. But either way, it’ll be okay.”

Elizabeth coughed slightly and squeezed my hand. “I expect you’re right, Jenny. I expect you’re right.”

Just then, my husband walked in and reached for Elizabeth’s hand, resting his on top of mine. “Grandma, we’re going to have a little boy running around our hill again.” My chest caved in. She would never see our little boy run down the lovely, green hill that lay behind our house. It was the same hill she’d run down as a tiny girl, and that her children, and her grandchildren had called home. I thought I might smack my husband in the gut for reminding her of what would never be.

Of course, Ed was just as frightened as Elizabeth was, probably more so. And all he could imagine was how much she’d enjoy feeding another little blonde boy with an enormous appetite and smiling eyes. I think he was so happy and proud to have our little dumpling of a person to show his grandma that for a moment, he forgot that the story would go unfinished for her.

Elizabeth smiled again, the perfect grandma, wanting to comfort one of her boys one last time.

“Oh, Eddie,” she said softly. “I’ll dream of it.”

•••

JENNIFER JAMES lives with her husband and three children in rural Virginia. After graduating from William and Mary in 1989, Jennifer moved to Gloucester County, where she found work as a teacher’s assistant and veterinary receptionist until 2000, when her first child was born. After an approximate decade of diapers and interrupted sleep patterns, Jennifer started writing with purpose in 2010 and has been at it since. A good story is her favorite thing.

A Year of Dreams

dream2 — By Jody Mace See more at I Draw My Dreams on Facebook

By Jody Mace

Once I was involved in a political revolt. The situation leading up to the revolt was horrifying. I’ll just mention the worst of the atrocities. The dictator was sawing people in half at the waist. Led by a wise, bald man, we succeeded in overthrowing the autocracy. My personal heroism was as follows: I rescued a baby from a river, and after we restored a peaceful democracy I contacted a dentist, because many children had lost their retainers during the struggle for freedom.

This was a dream.

The only reason I can describe this dream, three years after it occurred, is because for one year I drew every one of my dreams in cartoon format. I’ve been asked why I did this, and I’m not sure why I started, but I continued because when I shared the first picture on Facebook, it got lots of likes and my friends said it was funny, and I will do almost anything for a laugh. So I created a Facebook page.

It turns out that I had very few dreams in which I was a hero. In fact, the dreams exposed the worst of myself. I did things that I wouldn’t do in real life but might think about. I cheated in sports and I called small children “bitches” (and then lied about it: “Tell their parents I called them ‘witches.’”) I went ape-shit on a college professor who said I wasn’t listening, throwing desks around the room in an uncontrollable rage.

In my dreams I examined what I would do if presented with situations I was unlikely to face in real life. I learned that if I were a soldier, I would avoid injury by finding hiding spots whenever the shooting started. Also, after a rampaging hippo at the zoo was shot and killed, I looted its cage and stole its toiletries. (“This shampoo looks good!”)

Everyone knows this about dreams: they’re fascinating for the dreamer to talk about but boring as hell for the people who have to listen. Try telling someone your dream from last night and watch for the exact point when the listener’s eyes glaze over. It won’t take long.

But that’s not because dreams are boring. It’s because our storytelling is boring. We don’t know where to start the story and we sure don’t know where to end it. The interesting parts are buried in mundane detail. If I were to describe the political revolt dream but started at the beginning of the dream, where a tour group was packing into a bus and the driver said something a little weird and I looked out the window and saw someone selling hats, nobody would be listening by the time I got to where the dictator was sawing people in half, and that’s when it started getting interesting.

If you were telling someone a story about a close call on the freeway in the afternoon you wouldn’t start out by describing brushing your teeth in the morning. You probably wouldn’t include what kind of shoes you were wearing. Just because something happened doesn’t make it a part of the story.

Because I was drawing the dreams, I was forced to boil each dream down to its essential elements, maybe five or six frames. It also helped that I can’t draw. So everything that happened had to be depicted in the simplest manner possible, which made it impossible to include extraneous details. The cartoon me had maybe three distinct facial expressions during the course of the year, but I learned to draw those three facial expressions convincingly. My “angry” expression was particularly iconic.

My poor drawing skills did occasionally call for some explanation, so there are a few notes here and there, like “Third arm is an accident,” “Not really this tall,” “This is not a penis,” etc.

The exercise of identifying the interesting elements of a story, and figuring out where a story begins and ends helped me in my other writing as well. I became more ruthless, slashing words, sentences, paragraphs. I think that drawing badly made me a better writer.

Drawing my dreams also made me work harder at the visual aspect of storytelling. Sometimes the dream could be told with hardly any words, just pictures. In one dream I had read a book on caring for chickens and it said that it was good for chicks’ social skills to spend some time every day with a rooster. So the picture consisted of several frames of little chickens climbing all over a rooster, and finally a close-up of the rooster with a pissed off look on his face and the words, “The rooster is not amused.”

And maybe being creative in a medium for which you have no skill or talent helps your creativity as a whole, because you can’t rely on any skill you might have developed. I don’t know the “rules” of drawing the way I know the “rules” of writing. If there’s a grammar to illustration I don’t know what it is. So I had no filter, and it felt good to create with no filter.

Sometimes I drew other people’s dreams as well. They’d tell me the long, boring version of the dream, and I’d boil it down to the essentials. Several times I drew my husband’s dreams. They were interesting to me because of what they said about our relationship. Like this one: We were climbing around on a cliff. We got to a dangerous part and Stan said, “We should stop,” but I said, “No! Let’s go!” Then I fell off the cliff into a body of water. Stan had to jump into the water to rescue me, risking his own life, but I was dead. Only I wasn’t dead! I jumped up and said, “That was fun!” What this dream says about our relationship is that I’m the fun one.

I also drew my friend Christie’s dream in which she and Stan were driving a truck through the mountains, hauling several refrigerators wrapped in towels. The interesting part of the dream is that Christie and Stan were flirting with each other. Later Christie claimed that I misinterpreted her dream and that they were not flirting, but when you ask someone to draw your dream, the artist gets to make the call.

My favorite dream I drew was one of Stan’s. It’s also probably the most offensive. In this dream we were browsing a catalogue of organic meat and we had this conversation.

Me: “I think I’ll get a midget.”

Stan: “What? Do you have any idea how big a midget is?”

Me: “I’ll cut it up and put it in the freezer.”

Stan: “I’m not eating some tough old midget!”

What I like about this dream is that on the surface it appears that he’s the virtuous one, rejecting the notion of cannibalism. But really his objections focus on the space the midget will take up and the quality of the meat. (Also, I know we don’t use the word “midget” anymore, but this wasn’t my dream.)

During the year I drew my dreams, I found that I remembered more of them, probably because the first thing I did each morning was recall them so that I could draw them. I also kept a notebook by my bed so if I woke up in the middle of the night I could write down a word or phrase to help me remember the dream I had before I woke. Sometimes the scribbled notes made me a little sad, like when I read “monster on house” but couldn’t remember the dream.

Reading notes about these lost dreams made me appreciate even more the staggering creativity that goes into dreaming. During the day, sometimes I stare at a blank Word document wondering if I’ll ever get another idea, and I hit “save” after writing just a couple sentences, afraid of losing even one word. But at nighttime ideas flow so freely. I tell stories, make jokes, invent things, and paint pictures with absolutely no effort at all, and then they’re simply released, like they’re nothing. If I don’t catch them as soon as I wake, they’re gone forever.

I rarely draw my dreams anymore, but I still look forward to sleeping every night and not just because I’m tired. Every night I anticipate the places my brain will take me, the surprising connections it will make, the unlikely storylines and the unselfconscious confessions. Every night I hope that when I wake, before I fully surrender to the morning, that I can grab a thread from a dream, give it a gentle tug, and bring that lovely diaphanous memory with me into the world of solid things.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Hole in the Story

ghosttree — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.etsy.com/shop/ebethfuller

by Jody Mace

When my father was a teenager in Atlanta, wild dogs had become a problem in Adams Park. He and his friends were enlisted by the park rangers to ride through the park on horses, shooting the dogs. He never said much more about the incident, but why would he need to? The bare bones of the story were plenty.

I didn’t entirely believe it, but it was still my favorite dad story. I liked it better than the many variations of how he impressed the staff at restaurants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian) with his linguistic prowess. (He punctuated these stories by spitting out guttural sounds that he claimed were phrases in those languages.) I liked it better than the one about how he played golf just one time, with coworkers, and they were amazed at his natural skill. Or how, while in the Air Force, he was invited to become an astronaut, and, after successfully completing training, he decided he didn’t want to be an astronaut after all.

Those stories were lacking a couple things, but most notably, teenage boys galloping on horseback shooting guns in a park.

There were some holes in the story. It didn’t seem likely that any governmental authority would enlist teenagers to shoot at dogs, even back in 1949. But not just that. At the time, my father lived above his father’s grocery store in an urban area, sharing a bedroom with his Yiddish speaking grandmother. He rode streetcars and bought candy. He didn’t have a Wild West kind of upbringing.

He’s eighty now and his memory is shot. It’s not just short-term memory, although the repeated phone calls asking me what time I’m picking him up for lunch can send me around the bend. He’s losing details about things I thought he’d never forget: which college my brother went to, what musical instrument I played as a child. The other day a new acquaintance asked him how his wife died seventeen years ago and he didn’t seem to remember that she died of metastasized breast cancer. He didn’t remember the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, her devastating decline. He answered, “It wasn’t her heart,” then went quiet. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe it was too traumatic to revisit. But maybe the memory really was gone.

So when he tells his unlikely stories there’s no way to really know which details spring from memory and which are just from the habit of telling the story. When you repeat a story a lot, details gain authority—even if you’re not eighty.

•••

When my son was six, he accidentally knocked a trinket off a table at a flea market. The vendor exploded at my son and towered over him, waving his arms and yelling, until my boy started to cry. The item, which was worthless crap anyway, wasn’t even broken. My husband confronted the vendor. He didn’t actually say much—just, “If you have a problem with him, talk to me!” But we hadn’t even reached the car before the embellishments began. My husband was all in this guy’s face. He shoved him. The vendor cowered before him. He apologized. In some particularly enthusiastic tellings of the story, the vendor wet his pants. When I try to picture this event, I see it just as we tell it. My husband, nose-to-nose with the bully, standing up for our little son. I’m sure that our son, now fifteen, has no doubt about his dad’s heroics at that flea market.

That’s the power of story-telling. The way you tell a story can become more real than what really happened.

So who knows what happened in Adams Park in Atlanta sixty-four years ago? There’s no way to verify.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. During today’s visit after the usual business (the 500-foot roll of professional grade plastic wrap that he bought me off the internet, why his remote control didn’t work, the new brand of pickle relish he’s trying, which of the Harry Potter books is his favorite), I asked him about the story. For the first time, I asked him if it really happened the way he always told it.

And this time he told it a little bit differently. He said, “So they let us ride the horses for free or very cheap, and we rode around and scared the dogs away from the picnic tables.”

“So the part about the guns, that was just made up?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t shoot at dogs.”

“Had you ever ridden a horse before then?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

And suddenly the picture in my head changed. No longer did I see horses galloping through a park, ridden by wild, gun-wielding boys. Now I imagined city boys timidly perched on gentle horses, walking on a path.

The story was terrible.

“Dad, I think you should tell it the old way.”

But he had already moved on.

“No, I had never shot at anything at that age. Except this one time with Joe Arnold, who you didn’t know. He had a gun, a little .22 pistol, and we decided we were gonna go and shoot things. And I had a knack for it.”

He paused and leaned back.

“I shot a hole right through the middle of a dime.”

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. She likes to hear people tell their stories, especially when she’s not sure if they’re true.