Nonfiction by Liane Kupferberg Carter: Florid Feelings

Mr. Silverman wasn’t as handsome as the dreamy Mr. Steinfink who taught American History. No matter. I loved him. Fiercely. Fervently. Ardently. As only a moody and intense fourteen year old can worship a man of 25. It was 1968, when many draft-age men became teachers in order to avoid being sent to Vietnam. All our junior high school teachers were young, virile, and catnip to teenage girls.

Ira Silverman taught ninth grade English, and looked the professorial part: horn rimmed glasses, blazers with leather elbow patches. He was sarcastic and sensitive, a seductive combination. I would linger after class, waiting for him to notice that we were kindred souls. But Celia Schwartz, a flushed girl with googly green eyes, was always hanging around him too.

“Poetry is about compression,” he told us. “Learning to see is a discipline. Open your senses and drink the world in.”

Celia showed up the next morning with a pile of poems she’d written, quietly but effectively muscling me aside. Not to be outdone, I decided to pen poetry too.

Every afternoon that fall and winter, as Dusk Descended (as I would no doubt have written it then), I would wrench up my bedroom window and kneel in front of the hissing radiator, lowering its hinged lid to use its warm surface as my desk. I would press my nose to the rusted storm window, and suck in a cold sliver of metallic air. Feverishly I wrote, recording every passing sensation, as the sky turned cold magenta blue or fiery peach, and cars whooshed by below, their headlight beams sweeping the walls. I reveled in a voluptuous melancholy, closing out the sounds of my father’s tired tread passing my door, and my mother’s increasingly irritated calls to come set the table. When I wrote, the world fell away.

“I’m going to be a poet when I grow up,” I told my mother.

“That’s lovely, dear,” she said. “And how are you going to make a living?”

Comments like that made me furious. She didn’t understand. But I was sure Mr. Silverman did. Our world of poetry was private. Sacred. Mr. Silverman understood me. Sophisticated and sardonic, he was the grown up world that lay ahead.

Nearly every morning I would shyly hand him a new sheaf of poems I’d stayed up late to type on an old Olympia manual typewriter. He would pepper the onionskin pages with succinct comments: “Show don’t tell.” “Too obvious.” “Too emotional.” “Not enough.” “Too much.” And, thrillingly: “Very good, almost excellent.”

All that year, while I giggled with girlfriends, passed notes in study hall and tried to act worldly when we whispered about sex, I filled page after diary page with such overwrought outbursts as “How much longer can I endure this pain? It is shattering the frail wreck of my sensitive soul.”

In class one morning, as Mr. Silverman explained poetic license, some students passed around a photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s newly released album cover. I glanced at it, then stared. Oh my God, John and Yoko were naked. I had never seen a naked man. John Lennon had pubic hair? I looked up at Mr. Silverman with revulsion. Did he look like that, under his suit? I felt my face blaze.

“Man, I just don’t get it,” David Duffy was insisting to Mr. Silverman. “What does a poetic license look like?”

“I just told you, poetic license isn’t an object,” Mr. Silverman said, exasperated. “It’s a concept. It’s the writer’s freedom to break the conventional rules of language.”

“But where do you get it?” David insisted. God, he was so dense. Mr. Silverman looked at me, and rolled his eyes.

“At the Department of Motor Vehicles,” he said.

Day by day I handed him piles of poems, signing my name in lower case letters. I poured out my passion. The florid feelings simply flowed. “Were I to cry my longing to the cool wind and leave myself behind!” I scrawled. “Ah how heavy it is to be – how lonely this night!”

Breathlessly I brought him my yearbook at the end of the school term. I longed for a sign. Something that finally acknowledged and settled the bond between us. He wrote, “Without any writing on it/a piece of paper can be held/ any way you like/and it will be bright/ and pure/Empty your mind of the scribblings of darkness/ and live./Love Lee Love.”

I pored and puzzled over it for days, not sure if I was gratified or insulted. Scribblings? Darkness? Was he saying I was in some metaphoric dark place? That my poems were merely a teen’s overheated outpourings? Was he urging me to stop writing about an imagined life and start living it? But what of that last line? Was he secretly telling me to love him, or to leave him alone?

My mother gave me permission to invite Mr. Silverman to our family’s junior high graduation celebration. I pictured him standing on the front step of my parents’ house, and shivered with delicious anticipation. “Ira,” I kept thinking. “At last I’ll call him Ira.” He would finally see the woman in me. I would confess my love. He would confess his. We would kiss. There would be breathless words. And then…

That night I waited. Then I telephoned his house several times, letting the phone ring and ring. All through dinner, I watched the door of the restaurant, hoping he would appear. He never did.

He never called.

I never saw him again.

Liane Kupferberg Carter's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Babble, Parents, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, McCall’s, Errant Parent, and Brevity.

Susan Knox: Baby, Baby

The maternity ward. Alliance City Hospital. Alliance, Ohio. July 3, 1941. A new mother, twenty-five years old, stares out the window.

Is she remembering her lascivious grandfather, the rape, the termination ten years earlier. Is she picturing a small, windowless room, a man in a white coat, the mass of tissue he dangled in front of her face like a warning. Does she believe the sins of the father are visited upon the son and she will pay a penance for her grandfather’s perfidy. Is she worried because the nurse hasn’t brought the infant to her. Was it a difficult labor, a long labor. Was she sedated before the baby was born, a mask clamped over her face. Is she afraid her newborn is not normal, that she will be punished with a blemished child. Will she undo my pink receiving blanket and will she untie the ribbon holding the white plisse kimono and will she remove the safety pins closing the cloth diaper and will she bare my body and find a flaw, a deformity. Will she call for the doctor, show him the stigma, ask him what it means. Will the doctor reassure her, it’s only a missing toenail, nothing to worry about, or, not knowing her deep concern, will he laugh at her silliness.

Questions for my mother that I never asked. 

Susan Knox's book, Financial Basics:  A Money Management Guide for Students, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2004.  Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in CALYX, Monkey Puzzle, Pisgah Review, and Sunday Ink.

Diane Hoover Bechtler: Do It Yourself Project

It was not the kind of job tackled without help. But we did it ourselves, alone.

We had to. We were the single mothers of sons. Chloe was a widow. Her husband died in a car accident when the child was a baby. When our son was three, my husband left to chase other women.

Chloe received Social Security checks for her son. I collected sporadic child-support. Neither was enough to support us. So it was up to us to both work and raise those small men.

We forged our careers and raised our sons when two dope-smoking draft-dodging former hippies occupied the White House.

We knocked our heads against the glass ceiling as we climbed and left scratches as markers for our sisters to come. We pushed forward in sickness and in health. No one else was going to pay our rent or help us teach our small men to ride bicycles, to sail, play baseball, or later to shave and drive.  When we had to work extra hours or travel, we placed our sons with caretakers often of questionable abilities, so we could do our jobs and make money to feed our growing children. As in the beginning of time, a single cell split and made two. We were mother and father, caregiver, and provider. Chloe was in sales. I provided customer support, both of us in the graphic arts industry.

We brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan and did not think that commercial was funny. We were tired. In the summers, Chloe sent her son to spend time with her parents. I sent mine to basketball camp, archery school, tennis camp and whatever else I thought could shape him into a good man.

Together, Chloe and I bought tropical wool navy blue suits chosen with the Women's Dress for Success recommendations. Briefcases flapping against our Jane Fonda-firmed hips, we wore our serious suits and muted lipstick  to appointments with our clients. At home, we assembled model cars and studied the scales of train sets.

After late business meetings and only a Powerbar dinner, we attended PTA,wearing those ridiculous ties – like fake silk scarves for women with little anchors and turtles dotted across them. We drank our scotch neat. We smoked an occasional cigar. We already smoked cigarettes. We placed our MasterCards by our plates to signal wait staff that we were paying. Occasionally, we abused our privileges from our places of business by treating ourselves to dinners placed on our meager expense accounts. We took lunch at 3:00 so we could go to school conferences with our sons’ teachers.

Chloe grew her hair to her waist.  My hair was cut in an easy chin length bob quickly and cheaply trimmed at SuperCuts once a month. These were economical hairstyles.

For business, Chloe twisted her hair or clipped it in a barrette.  But on weekends she'd let that hair flow and fly.  It was like wheat.  Mine was black as sin. She was a color like lemon. I was not a color. She had the golden hair. I had the midnight black hair. She looked great standing in a cornfield and I looked great over candlelight. Night and day.

She painted and I sculpted in the bit of free time we had. We never expected our painting and sculpting to put food on the table.

Rather than be second-rate struggling fine artists we applauded the works of others by attending gallery openings. So after a week of doing double duty, Chloe and I drove to the arts district and strutted. I have a photo of us standing on a red carpet after an art gathering.

She and I did not walk.  We swished and bounced. "Thriller" blared in the background and we danced, planting one foot and stomping around it with the other foot. We let go the tensions of the week.


Many boyfriends came and went. Few stayed very long.  We were incredibly picky about who got close to our sons, our best creations.  Some men saw our sons as possibly being their sons. They missed the window of creating a family so looked to us as potential providers.

I eventually married again only to choose another womanizer.


Chloe broke my heart more than any man could have. After vowing to grow old together and sit side by side in rocking chairs staring at ocean waves, until death did us part, Chloe renounced her vow and moved away without me.


Years have passed. I see Chloe occasionally. She comes to my town. Or I go to hers. So in a way we have grown old together, but my rocking chair is here and hers is hundreds of miles away. Our sons have not seen each other in a decade.

Our careers ended. We passed our business torches. We have reverted to one person rather than two.

Our children have grown into men-good men. We did a fine job of raising them alone, of doing it ourselves. Raising our little boys into tall men made us grow taller and stronger.

We still do most things ourselves. The pace has slowed. We have the time.

I miss weekends with my best friend kicking back and having fun. I miss the little boys who now bring home women who may join our lives and provide grandchildren. One and one will equal three. Chloe's hair is very short now and streaked with gray. Mine is too black for a woman my age.

I miss our journey.


Diane Hoover Bechtler lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael Gross, who is a poet with a day job, and with their cat, Call Me IshMeow. 

Merlaine Sivels: Daddy Issues

When I was younger, he stuck around. He got an apartment nearby, dropped in whenever mom went to work and my brother went to play basketball. He would rent movies, a new one every week. We would watch them together. Eat all the frozen pizzas in the house together. 

The next day, mom had warned me not to let him do that again. She’d said it was bad for his blood pressure.

As I got older, he drifted farther away.

Location-wise, he was a nomad. 

Parked his truck in empty fields and slept in it. He only parked in places where he knew he wouldn’t get a ticket, and he would call me, telling me the newest place he’d managed to fall asleep. It was dangerous, his like of work. People robbed trucks and shot truckers, I was told, and for the longest time I would spend nights awake, wondering if I would get a call from him the next morning. He always seemed to make it, and by day, he emptied the truck to the designated store. Then be on his way again. 

He had sent me postcards. 

Alabama, Washington, Las Vegas, Utah, Texas, Maryland, California.

I still have them. My favorite was Virginia. He would call and ask me if I’d received the latest postcard, and I would reply with a yes, I had, but Virginia will always be my favorite. For a while, she let him come back, my mom.

She let him stay with us and we played house again for a while. He was the daddy. She was the mommy. I was the daughter and my brother was the son. The roles were intricate. My part was easy, but everyone else struggled. Eventually my mom got sick of pretending. She wanted him out. He left. She apologized to me.

To my brother. My brother took her sorry to heart, as if he was the one who’d been wounded. 

I remember going into another room and calling him, tell him that she apologized. He never picked up. Never called back.

I am a girl of false hopes, my mother told me once. He promises me things. I cling to them with all my heart, all my soul. When he doesn’t deliver, I am heartbroken. But he makes more promises and I cling some more.

Nowadays she tells me that I don’t remember the old him. The one who sent me to bed without food. Who pushed me to the ground whenever I would kiss her goodnight. The one who pinched me so hard he split my tender six-year-old skin in half for biting on a straw. 

She says that if I remembered the way I would cry in her arms while he was outside mowing the law, the way I would wail in my bedroom at night after he went to work, the way I would shake in his presence when I did something he didn’t like. If only I remembered that side of him then I wouldn’t hold on the way I did.

But all I can say to her is that he is my dad, and you can never let your number one fan go.

He doesn’t call me on my twentieth birthday. I don’t wake up waiting for it, but at the end of the day, I realize there is one voice I haven’t heard from. When I call him, he assures me, yes, he did call, and he even left a message. While he is speaking, I check my phone for the voicemail sign. 

It’s not on.

I ask him when I will see him again. It has been almost a year. We make plans for Sunday. He has a delivery in Miami for Monday, so he will pass through Orlando for a few hours. 

I am excited. Not just to see him, but just to be in his presence. To hear him talk in person, for once. To see his facial features, that huge smile I got from him. I miss it all.  He does not call me on Saturday.

On Sunday, I wake up early, dress, and put my keys in the ignition, as my phone buzzes with a new text message. I don’t need to read it. I pull my keys out, go back inside, undress and go back to bed.

At my door, my mom, is on the verge of tears because she can hear mine. False hopes, honey. False hopes. 

Three days later, I read the text message. We have new plans for Sunday again. He will be there, my phone assures me.

He does not call me on Saturday. On Sunday, I wake up early, dress, and put my keys in the ignition. My phone is silent the entire drive.

Since sixteen, we have met at the Navy Exchange, even though I am twenty nothing has changed. I drive around the parking lot, looking for him. I find his truck. 

The purple eighteen-wheeler is tall behind the old lawn and garden building. When I pull up he is not there. I park behind it and go look for him. I find him exiting the barbershop. From faraway, he is my dad. My daddy.

The man that woman would swoon over at my brother’s basketball games, at my job, in restaurants, in theme parks. He is tall and poise, walking with his back straight, like the military taught him. His hair, which has been balding since before I could remember, is cropped closely to his head. From far away, that smile is bright with memories of his little girl, and momentarily I expect him to run to me and scoop me into his arms like he used to. But he doesn’t. He keeps walking, and when we are standing face to face with each other, I realize that I have made a mistake. 

This man is not my father. 

His hair is salt and pepper instead of black. His eyes, usually vigilant and alert, are tired and baggy, as if they threaten to close at any moment. His stomach, once flat and muscular, is now heavy with the threat of a gut. His muscular arms are skinny.

And his face.

He is handsome still. But his face is accented with heavy lines around his mouth, around his eyes, on his cheeks, like origami art that has been deconstructed. 

I stare because I don’t know what to say. What do you say to a stranger?

He speaks first; a loud obnoxious greeting that if I was still thirteen would have made me laugh hysterically. Now it makes my bottom lip quiver. 

I greet him, closing in for a quick hug. He embraces me and even manages to lift me off the ground an inch or two. I do not stay airborne for long, and it scares me to think that there will come a time when he will no longer be able to do that.

When he releases me, my cheeks are wet. I tell him it is allergies. He believes me. 

We walk and he tells me about the allergies he had while in Alabama. He throws his head back in a laugh and says that I wouldn’t last a minute there. I nod, still looking at him, never looking away. I want to be able to see when this man will turn back into my dad. I want to watch the metamorphosis. He asks me what’s wrong? It’s my birthday.

I should be happy.

I reply that I am old now. He laughs again. That same laugh that sounds like my dad’s. He asks me how I have been. How is my boyfriend? How is my brother? How is my car (he can’t help but comment that it still looks like shit)? 

I tell him everything is good. Everyone is fine.

I don’t tell him about how I have moved in with my boyfriend, how my brother has moved out because of fights with mom, how my car stopped working in the middle of the highway the other day, how my heart stutters when I laugh too hard or sleep on my stomach, about my puppy, about my grades. 

He doesn’t pry.

He tells me about his fiancée. He calls her Mrs. Sivels. 

When he says this, I laugh for the first time. I picture my mom. She isn’t, but to me, she will always be the only Mrs. Sivels. It is not as funny to him as it is to me. To him it is not funny at all.

We walk around the exchange for an hour. When he finds something he likes, he gets my attention by calling my name and begging me to look.

It reminds me of our road trips when I was younger. When we would pass a field of horses or cows, he would nudge me repeatedly. 

 

Look! Look! Cows!

I indulge him by feigning interest. 

In return, I point to things I like. He merely nods, continues walking. Makes a comment about my mom buying me something if I want it bad enough. When we pass the jewelry department, he shows me the ring he plans on buying for the new and improved Mrs. Sivels. 

It is five thousand dollars. He informs me that she is worth every penny.

He does not have time to take me out to my birthday lunch as we planned. He admits that I took too long getting there. We eat at a sub shop.

I do not like subs, but I don’t speak up. He doesn’t ask.

He eats quickly, almost swallowing his sub whole. 

Mouth full, he confides in me that he loves their subs. How does mine taste? As he is speaking, mine slips out of my hand on to the floor. He laughs. My stomach growls. I did not eat breakfast that morning in order to have room for lunch.

He says oh, well. He shrugs.

We are silent as we walk to my car and his truck. I cannot help but still look at him, but this time I know he is not going to change. For me, there will be no metamorphosis into the man I knew.

He pats me on the back as I stop in front of his truck. He tells me that he has something for me. I cannot help it, I get excited. I did not expect anything from him. He dashes into the cab of his truck and rummages around for a few minutes. The longer he takes the more my heart sinks. He yells down to me that he might have lost it—Oops, he found it. He steps down the cab with two envelopes. One blue. One yellow.

Both of them read To My Favorite Girl.

Before I can open them, he tells me that he has to get going. He’s sorry he can’t stick around.

I understand, or at least that’s what I tell him.

I admit to him that I had a good time. It had been too long since I last saw him.

He is already in his truck, turning his keys, and pressing buttons. He pulls the string that hangs by his head, and the sound of his horn reverberates through the parking lot as he exits on to the highway.

When I can no longer see him, I open the first envelope. The yellow one. 

It is a Valentine’s Day card. When I open the card, it sings a quick song and to the side he writes a simple message telling me to be good, don’t do anything he wouldn’t. I smile, close the card. Slip it back into the envelope, and slip the envelope in my bag.

I open the second card, the blue one. 

There is a small postcard inside. There are big city lights and people smiling, showgirls dancing, casinos and gambling all on the front. Las Vegas, it reads in pink lettering.

When I flip it over there is a small greeting. To the right is his scribbled handwriting:  I always remembered that this one was your favorite. Happy 22nd birthday, young lady.

Merlaine Sivels is pursuing a degree in English education and has promised her mother that she would publish at least one story during her lifetime (her mother's, that is, not that she plans on passing anytime soon.)

 

Lisa Gurney: The Mane Mutiny

Being bald is at the very top of my mother’s lamentation list.  By age sixty, her crown was completely naked, hugged at the base of her skull by a Franciscan-like ring of thinning wisps.

Within an hour of meeting someone, my mother will invariably pull off her wig and say “Isn’t this sad?  Look at what happened to me, and at such an early age, too.”  Annoyed, I promptly respond, “Stop it!  Your circumstance could be far worse.”  Her face falls from the pain of being misunderstood, though she does mutter a weak “I know.”

At the onset of my fortieth year, however, I’ve become more sympathetic to my mother’s plight.  My hair is starting to follow the same ebbing path hers took.  My locks are losing weight, becoming anorexic, exposing a bed of bright white skin. I can clearly see where my follicle future is heading, and it is all down-scalp.

I’ve begun to understand that it is more than just about diminishing hair.  The loss speaks of waning beauty, growing old, and about losing a tool in the feminine wiles arsenal.  It is a sign that I am on the “other side” of my life.  There is a breadth of emotion packed in those dwindling strands.  What else is going to thin and eventually disappear?

Now, I no longer get annoyed or frustrated when my mother sits with a sad look in her eyes, head bent so my husband can shave the remaining and tired tufts that poke through her wig.  I feel sad too.  And I wonder why my response to her has been insensitive when she raised me to be kind of heart, empathetic, and generous in relationships.  Perhaps I am putting up hard words to shield me from unpleasant realities, my mother’s aging and her inability to view it as anything other than a heavy burden.

Luckily, I have the aptitude to view my own aging differently, and I will have a say in how I let the mutiny of my mane affect me.  When the time comes I won’t whip off my wig to near strangers.  Instead, I’ll discover if blondes really do have more fun and if red-heads are fierier.  Brightly patterned turbans will adorn my head, accompanied by large hoop earrings, sweeping bohemian skirts and sandals.  Who knows, maybe I’ll get a tattoo that says "Bald is Beautiful" and just go commando. 

Lisa Gurney quit her Fortune 500 job in 2007 to pursue her dream of writing full time. Since then, her fiction and essays have been published both in print and online in the U.S. and Canada. She is the recipient of the 2007 National PRNDI Award for Commentary for her essay "A Witness to Violence."  She resides in Worcester, MA and welcomes comments at lisajgurney@gmail.com.

Ke Huang: On Matchmaking

My mother refused the first marriage offer presented to me. She would not tell me about it until years later and there are days I wish she had consulted me before the refusal.

Overlooking the 18th floor to the city that still clings to its maritime exploration of the past, tendered from one window a hill hoarded with russet-tiled chalky buildings cloaking the crown of the São Jorge Castle and, on the other, an assortment of variegated condominiums framing the blue wavy Tagus and its white hairband Vasco da Gama Bridge.

While I swept the faux plank flooring, mother waved the mop for the watery finish. We ended our discussion of the plan to visit the house of my parents' best friends.

"You know," mother began, "Lizhen a-yi once told me that you and her Shengguo should have gotten together."

I forgot about my dust-gathering duties: "When did that happen?" The least of my doubts was questioning the veracity of her comment. Since I saw several Chinese films and TV shows where parents made the marriage arrangements for their children, my inquiry concerned why mother had left me out.

"Don't know," she answered more focused on making a smudge on the floor go away, "she mentioned once. He isn’t right for you, you're going abroad for college and he barely graduated high school."

Was mother right? Did my fate make me that different from Shengguo? Maybe he went on excursions to Paris and Rome but would not share my years of studying media and mingling with aspiring filmmakers in the two liberal American Meccas. While he stayed in Europe and dealt with the cardigan sweater trading, I went on writers' workshops where all our knitted goods were the interlacing of plots, characters and dialogue.

The marital arrangements for Lizhen a-yi and A-Zhong buobuo’s sole progeny doesn't end here. A few years after, mother would go on a business trip to China and run into a distant female cousin. Ma came back praising Lihui jiejie as if she were the Chinese Grace Kelly and introduced Lihui to Shengguo. The two had their inter-continental courtship and have been happily married for five years.

In a society that preaches women to follow the three obediences of father (before marriage), husband (when married) and son (in widowhood), I see mother's meddling in other couples as her subversions to patriarchy. Like an executive producer of a dating reality show, her role as matchmaker gives her carte blanche to access the life of a family, interviewing immediate relatives, arranging a meet of the two young contestants and waiting for the season to unfold. Granted mother doesn't get the paycheck of a Mike Fleiss but the set of bed linens she receives every time her matches end in marriage must have a sentimental value equivalent to the pay of any producer of a hit ABC show.

Mother's "dating show" seasons have had a mixed success. Her first couple, which she matched when we still lived in China, had a rather gruesome end. The newly married husband lost control of his bike while on a commute and plunged down a river. According to mother, when the corpse was hoisted out, the swollen body still clutched on to the bike. Personally, I would have taken the tragedy as a sign that I am no matchmaker material but not mother, she has introduced four times more couples than the times she has birthed children.

Ma doesn't even sound that different from TV executives I have heard speak at entertainment industry seminars and panel discussions. If they had a credit in hit shows, they were more than willing to admit they contributed for the success, but when a program flops, they will be the first to voice out they were not to blame. Mother will tell you how many of her matchees have evolved in blissful marriages and produced healthy children but most likely omit the river-bike misfortune.

Despite being aware of her limitations, I was always convinced that her method was for me. Maybe mother did stop my first arrangement but she could know a single man in her social network that could be a suitable prospective husband.

"You want a what?" A good American friend of mine blurted out. Elise was driving us down the leafy section of Santa Monica Boulevard for bar-hopping on the neon-blinking Sunset Strip.

"An arranged marriage," I answered, surprised that Elise and I had never addressed the topic before.

"What if you don't love him and end up miserable?"

"You're talking about forced marriage, an arranged marriage is when a man and a woman are introduced by someone else but have the choice to decide if they want to get married."

"That’s matchmaking! Your mother is a matchmaker," Elise continued while turning down her car radio, "still, I would try finding someone I love myself before I took on matchmaking."

“That’ll save you from buying a set of bedsheets for the matchmaker.” I tried to joke while hiding what really puzzled me. Could Elise be right? Just because mother could help me find a man didn't exclude me from trying other ways. For six months, I gave dating a try. It included the more "traditional" ways like flirting at Halloween parties, signing-up for a couple of online sites, cultural events for Chinese UCLA grad students and even the more unorthodox methods such as speed dating and going out with someone who picked me up at the Big Blue Bus stop. 

For the benefit of those who don't take the public transport in Los Angeles, let me apprise you that there is a tacit hierarchy for the omnibus network. I would have never spoken to a man while riding an orange or red Metro bus but the lime-colored Culver City and royal blue Santa Monica vehicles are in another category. Since CCB and BBB cover the suburban and beach residential areas, their riders are less likely to have a putrid smell and more prone to wear unsoiled attire than the counterparts of the L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 

Another excuse why I trusted Mr. BBB was that he was a fellow UCLA grad student with Israeli parents but raised in South Africa. My maternal chromosome envisioned that if we were to pursue a relationship, it could mean that our combined international backgrounds would birth children who could call homes the regions of North America, Western Europe, Subsaharan Africa, The Levant and East Asia. But like the man who preceded and the one who succeeded him, Triple B decided that we should just be friends. I don’t mean to bitch. These males had a good reason to fear a serious relationship. In a town where they can play with voluptuous aspiring actresses and Playmates wanna-bes, a flat-chested vegan creative writing MFA-candidate whose only asset is her adequate legs doesn't make her premier girlfriend material. Fall quarter ended, holiday lights fettered L.A. vegetation and I gave my romance adventures a rest to return to Portugal to my Christmas-and-Hanukkah-less jia.

I dug through my leather-less closet and picked out items that could be donated to the collection box at the Buddhist association to which mother belonged. Her soft voice yelled out: "Come here, quick!"

Mother had told me that she would call me once she got connected to a female cousin from Shanghai to discuss my plan to return to China once my American student visa terminated.

I sped down the chilly hall, advancing past the alcove shimmering crimson and golden Buddha figurines; stepped into ma and ba's room and plunked on the chair beside her. We faced a humming desktop computer and an E.T.-shaped webcam. On the left corner of the screen, the image of Cousin Gulan's oval face framed by an ebony bob cut fluttered, her eyes casting down as she could only be avoiding her webcam to watch the screen.

We exchanged pleasantries, conferred about my living arrangements if I were to settle in Shanghai and cut into the tofu meat of the conversation.

"A friend from my office. Now he’s back to school for a Ph.D. in engineering... The only thing is that you’ll tell me he’s too old."

"He is too old," mother interjected as she adjusted her dewy green beaded jade necklace.

You've been talking through this without telling me? I parried my annoyance and asked instead: "Is he over 30?"

"Thirty-two," cousin nodded. The remote connection mismatched her voice to her image.

"But he's quiet," mother tapped my forearm, "listen to your cousin, she knows what she's talking about."

"He has great temper," cousin added and I couldn’t help to imagine that she reminded me of a pirated poorly-dubbed novela.

"You don't need to worry about me now."

Mother cut in: "You think this is worrying? You can’t have deadlines for these things. When you get to Shanghai, it's not like there’ll be men lined up after to marry you."

My head continued to cogitate and heard words pour out of my mouth: "With the time I have left from my visa, I'm going to apply for a Ph.D. in America."

"You're not coming home to teach English?" Cousin's flickering screen image frowned.

"It could be a good idea," mother said and then took a sip from her clay-textured tea mug, "then if she wants to go back home to teach, she’ll be qualified for universities."

I decided not to tell them that what mainly swayed me to stay in America for a handful more years was that I was hooked with the idea of finding love; of spending time with someone not because a matchmaker said we were suitable but because we were lucky to have found each other. Maybe L.A. wasn't the place to meet a serious male but I would move to a small college town and give it another try. Most single women snicker when I tell them that I realized that being in L.A., it's easier to get accepted into a doctorate program than meeting a future husband. A less of a laughing matter was that I was seduced by the American ways of coming across a beau that isn’t just an amenable partner. My plan would, as the Chinese expression goes, "one arrow double vultures;" by completing research in an area of interest while questing for romance on the side.

Cousin and mother were not to blame for the likelihood of their misunderstanding me. If etymological roots can suggest the origin of an idea, then it is revealing that the term "romance" in Mandarin is lanman, a close transliteration of the Latin word. As much as we Chinese pride ourselves for our five-millennia-long history, the idea of romantic love is most likely an European import. While devotion and duty for families is customary in our culture, the feeling that moves St. Valentine's Day may come from the "exotic" Western world, an idea that had lured me.

As a Portuguese of Chinese decent, Ke Huang learned most of her English from watching Hollywood movies.  She has a B.S. from Syracuse and MFA in screenwriting from UCLA.  Her writing consists of comedy, drama and horror stories about ethnic experiences. 

Mira Mattar: Beirut 2010

We met in a restaurant in Beirut, overlooking the sea, December, perfect crisp warmth. A rock jutted violently out of this particular patch of sea, known, my aunt told me, to be a favored spot for suicides. I can see why. Turning back from there would be embarrassing and difficult. Crawling back squeaking sorry guys I changed my mind, life is worth it after all. 

 

I hadn't been to Beirut for thirteen years and had bad memories of diarrhea and cold chicken. It was some time in the early nineties when I saw my father's weeping reflection in the car window as his hometown sped and stopped in ruins outside our little yellow cocoon. Scrappy pre-teens in donated t-shirts reading Coca-Cola or Nike flicking cigarette butts and kicking footballs. This time as we walked through new, reconstructed parts of the defiant city he pointed out the bullet holes still in buildings, distinct from the new embellished facades of recovery. 

 

My aunt, at lunch, nervous with sickness and intelligence and excited to see us after so many years of letters and birthday cards scrawled in French-educated, shaky script having been tampered with by doctors for an inconvenient condition. Years of internal and external shocks, treatments. It always seemed, from the stories I'd heard, to be the most likely or honest consequence of the situation she was in. Dreaming of husband and children, seeing strange men in the corners of her eyes, bombs crashing where the sea should be. Now she jumped from memory to memory, leapt into the present, into the tabbouleh and hummus, her brother allowing her half a beer for the special occasion, then back into her long-haired, slim-waisted past, I was a beautiful woman you know. 

 

I stayed with her, listening, trying to make contact, holding her hand. She gave me random objects from her tiny flat as presents and showed me photographs of her in Russia as a young woman, where she ran away and had to be recovered. She proudly showed off the luxury shopping districts in her town and laughed at the Lebanese capacity to rebuild. Her hair is still black, she reads fiction and makes tea in dirty cups. When I hugged her goodbye I fell for Beirut. 

Mira Mattar is a tutor, freelance writer and reviewer for the TLS and other publications. Her fiction has recently been published in Spilt Milk Magazine. She is also one third of Monster Emporium Press. She lives in South London where she is currently working on her first collection of short stories. You can read her at http://hermouth.blogspot.com

Cecily Tripplehorn: The Six Percent, A Survivor’s Story

Maybe it was just mother’s intuition. In retrospect it seemed like a premonition. We couldn’t have predicted that my mother’s advice would eventually give me the courage to save my own life.

 “If anything ever happens to you, if you’re ever attacked, scream your lungs out and resist with all your strength. Your chances of attracting attention and getting rescued are better while you’re still in a public place than if you’re taken,” Mom would lecture every time a news report popped up covering someone like Natalee Holloway or Chandra Levy.

“Sure, Mom,” I always replied, humoring her and thinking, what are the odds?

May 17, 2006. Twenty-six years old. It happened in Amarillo, Texas, at a park in an upscale neighborhood referred to as the good side of town. I didn’t have the patience to sit through my boyfriend Jim’s softball game, so I rollerbladed around the field in the humid spring air under the bright stadium lights. The sounds of softball fans cheering drowned out everything else, and the smooth, even rhythms of my stride calmed me and erased the stresses of daily life.

Finally, muscles aching, I headed toward the parking lot to grab my water out of Jim’s truck. That night the fields were so crowded we had to park on the front row. “Perfect,” Jim  had muttered earlier as he squeezed his black Dodge Ram into the tight space. “Right in the fly ball zone.  Might as well paint a big target on my windshield.”

I climbed back into the tall truck and gulped down some Evian like I’d just crossed the Sahara. My breath returned to normal and I stepped out of the truck to make my way toward –

Someone grabbed me in a headlock from behind. Surely just one of the teammates playing a joke, I rationalized. Not Jim though.  He’s busy pitching. Whoever it was threw me into the driver’s seat of another truck beside Jim’s Dodge. A leering face in a red, white and blue doo-rag hovered over my wide eyes and gaping mouth, and it was definitely not Jim, or one of his teammates, or anyone I knew. All logical thought processes froze at that moment as he pressed up against my dangling legs so close I couldn’t move. “Don’t scream,” he snarled as he put his hand over my mouth. Those words made me snap back to reality, and I started screaming as hard as I could. But my screams were indistinguishable from the cheering fans just about 50 feet away.

Then, a flash of silver in front of my face. “Shut up and get in the truck or I’ll slit your throat.” His voice was full of rage. Images of everyone I loved flashed through my mind.  In that instant I knew I wasn’t afraid of death, but I was deathly afraid of what he might want to do to me first. Thoughts of Jim, alone and frantically searching for me after the crowds dispersed before having to call my parents when he realized I was gone were too much to bear.

In a move Jason Bourne would envy, I grabbed the blade of the knife with my bare hand and went Billy Blanks on him. The blade sliced into my palm and fingers, but a rush of adrenaline suppressed the pain. Driven by survival instincts and the determination not to cause my family suffering, I resolved that this man could not, would not control me. There was no way I could kick him with my legs restrained by the weight of his body, but with the keys in my hand I went for his eyes. Never again do I wish to feel the primal urge to kill someone in defense of my own life.

Frustration began to overcome me with the realization that I wasn’t inflicting enough damage. His 5 foot 9, 195 pound construction worker’s build was stronger than my 5 foot 6, 130 pound frame, no matter how many cardio kickboxing classes I’d taken.

But then I sensed that the element of surprise was shifting. He didn’t want to be caught; that much was obvious from the look of shock on his face when I started to resist. And although we hadn’t attracted any outside attention yet, clearly I was more trouble than he had bargained for.

Nevertheless, the punches kept coming and stars danced in front of my eyes. Don’t pass out, I thought to myself. Keep fighting. Don’t pass out.

At last I got in a hard jab to his temple, and as he shook his head, I gathered all my strength to force myself out from underneath his grasp, falling and scraping my knees on the rough asphalt.

But it wasn’t over. He went to grab me again. Just then I looked up to see someone walking into the parking lot. Relief flooded my entire being and I suspected he was an angel disguised as an umpire. Somehow, with my hands shredded and still on rollerblades, I managed to scramble to my feet. Then I was standing near the umpire, Alvino Alvarez. Tears clouded my vision as I gasped, “Please get his license plate.”

My attacker jumped in his work truck with the construction company logo on the door and peeled out, almost running over a couple who tried to block his escape.

Then, a blur. Crowds of gawkers. Police statements. Ambulance. Hospital.

At the hospital, the shock wore off slowly, in layers, like scrubbing ink off skin. A detective was taking yet another statement while doctors and nurses buzzed around. I couldn’t remember my address. I wasn’t even sure about my age at that point.  “It’s okay,” the officer said.  “Temporary memory lapses are typical after trauma.”

“You did the right thing by fighting back,” a nurse commented as the doctor carefully inserted nineteen stitches. “Did you know only six percent of victims manage to escape like you did?” I feigned cheerfulness to assure my boyfriend that I really was okay. Jim stayed at my bedside until we were released an exhausting seven hours later at 5:00 a.m. After a quick stop at the 24 hour pharmacy for some pain meds, at last I could rest.

The next year seemed endless.  My relatively sheltered and comfortable life was now interspersed with periods of anxiety and apprehension. The day after the attack, I identified the attacker, Dewey Mack Evans, from a photo lineup at the police station. Other witnesses corroborated.  The following month, in June, U.S. Marshalls surrounded a gas station across the state border in Oklahoma and took Evans into custody. That September, Jim and I got engaged. The next June, we were married. Then in August, 15 months after the attack, the trial began. Evans and his attorney concocted an elaborate story claiming I attacked him.  The poor guy was just defending himself, the slick lawyer explained.  When they accused me of perjury it started to feel like I was the one on trial.

The jury deliberated for an excruciating four and a half hours before convicting Evans of aggravated kidnapping with a sentence of 80 years in prison. Since he was on parole for armed robbery at the time, he also had to serve the rest of that 10 year sentence. Evans wouldn’t be considered for parole again for at least 40 years at the age of 86. By then he would be too old and decrepit to harm anyone else.

The courtroom trial was over, but my emotional trials were ongoing. My emotions were a confusing mix of pride and guilt, vindication and cynicism, strength and vulnerability. While I tried to deal with the situation without dwelling on it, not a day went by that something or someone wouldn’t remind me of it. Never again would I feel comfortable alone in a parking lot or exercising outdoors by myself. But I was also bizarrely thankful that it had happened to me. If he had chosen a different victim, I might have turned on the T.V. that night to see another Natalee Holloway-esque story, and a predator might still be free.

The haunting faces of missing girls are a repeat occurrence on the nightly news. Each time their parents appear begging, pleading and crying for the return of their daughters, my eyes brim with tears and I feel an inexplicable kinship with these young girls and women I have never met. That could be my family, heartbroken and searching for closure they might never receive. My tears are followed by waves of guilt because I survived and they didn’t.

My happy ending could have been another victim’s final ending.

Cecily Tripplehorn is a survivor, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a high school English teacher.  For this article, she consulted the work Kidnapping: An Investigator's Guide to Profiling by Diana M. Concannon, 1st ed., London 

Diane Glancy: A Rocky Shelf

I’m not sure when it occurred to me.  Maybe it was while traveling between St. Paul and Kansas City.  Maybe it was the early retirement program at my college in Minnesota, though I was old enough to retire.  I wanted to be closer to my three grandchildren.  I had been commuting anyway.  Some semesters, leaving after classes, it was dark before I made it to Iowa.  There also was the weather, snow and ice.

I signed the retirement-agreement contract, which required the exiting professor to give up tenure and enter a four-year sabbatical at half-pay, and wrote a prospectus of what I planned to accomplish during the four years.  It was mostly writing projects.  Nowhere was the real reason listed—to be a grandmother.

I wanted to enter that world of young grandchildren that is only there for a while—because it fit in this situation—because it was possible—before they are so engrossed in their activities they tell me to wait in the car.  Soon they will be on with their lives and I imagine myself a backdrop, less important in their lives, as it should be.  Already, I am the outsider; once in a while, an insider.  I know the tightrope between, and the frustration of dealing with three young children each one going their own way.  I already have felt estrangement with the oldest because of his insistence on dominating his two younger siblings.  I don’t like the meanness they thrust on one another when they fight.

Sometimes I return to my house and sit by myself in the quiet.  Sometimes I even feel a slight anger.  I was a tenured professor.   I could do what I wanted.  What I eventually wanted, was to be with my grandchildren.  I gave up my beloved position of 17 years, and tenure for which I had worked hard, and worried over just a few short years earlier.

I wanted to be a part of their lives because I began to see that being a grandmother was a continuity.  What I couldn’t do for my children, or didn’t know to do, or was too harried, or unhappily married, I could re-do.  Being a grandmother is a revision.  A chance to rewrite.  A privilege to add to what their mother is doing very well, though her husband travels for his work, and she is under the stress and pressure of young children, and as with current life-style a hundred activities a day.  One Saturday alone is filled with soccer games, birthday parties, a multitude of errands.

I wanted a chance to be a better grandmother than mother, in an unsatisfying marriage, impatient, hurt, longing for a way out.

I wanted to provide stories for my grandchildren.  “What book did you bring me, Grandma?”  They ask when I return from a trip.

It is in stories, oral and written, that I have my being.  On a recent sleep-over, I read six books to Libby, who had opened a 7th when I turned out the light.  I want to provide stories for my grandchildren.  I am buyer of books, a filler of bookshelves.

A grandmother’s story-telling is cartography.  It is map-making.  This is where we have been.  This is where we can go because of words.  Cherokee, which I do not speak, is a language like a lake with its rippling edges, the water, moving, sometimes restless, always with fish in it, mysterious, the submerged meaning, the reason for water is a holder of fish, as language is the holder of words to tell us where and how we are going.   I also want to instill them with a sense of faith.

There are times with my four-year old granddaughter, Libby, especially, that I feel the concept of time space in physics.  A connection back to my grandmothers born in the 1880’s.  A continuum of voice, of story.  A physical presence of the past that I give my granddaughter, not in words, but in essence, in connection to something larger than the two of us.   It is not in words, as I said, but a sensed distillation of time in a small shape that is the moment between us.

On Fridays, sometimes, I take Libby to art lessons at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.   It is where I went as a child.  It is where I took my children.  Afterwards, Libby and I go to Winstead’s on the Plaza for fries and a milk shake.  This week, when I read her the flavors, she says, “cherry.”   As she is drinking it, she tells me she likes cherry shakes, “but not a cherry in a circle.”   I want to be there to receive that kind of information from her.  I want to be there when she takes a risk of a shake she may not like.

At the Nelson, Libby works with clay.  “It isn’t ready to bring home yet,”  she tells me with a sense of importance, but she gives me a collage she made.  It is a piece of black paper with fragments of colored paper glued to it, and a few crayon markings on the fragments.  I like her work because I am a worker in fragments.  I am separated between cultures, places, languages.  I have the grandchildren’s drawings in my house and at my cabin.  At my house, Libby chooses to add her collage to a paper-construction robot made by the boys, which they taped to my dining-room wall.  Actually, her collage improves the robot greatly.

While she is at her art lesson, I walk through the museum.  There are several of Henry Moore’s pieces at the Nelson.  I identify with one in particular, Draped Seated Woman, 1957-58, because I am draped with the heavy covering of grandmother.  In a note beside the sculpture, Moore wrote that he wanted to “connect the contrast in the size of the folds, here small, fine and delicate, in other places big and heavy with the form of the mountains, which are the crinkled skin of the earth.”  Moore’s sculpture is a nearly life-sized woman cast in bronze, her face a wedge without features.  Almost like the beak of a bird.  But when I look at the folds in the drape covering the woman, I see the folds as waves on a lake.

I want to say that grandchildren make you selfless.   It is all them.  Their clothes.  Their toys.  Their furniture.  Their happiness.  But it is selfishness.  They are mine.  Mine.  All mine.  No one else can have them.  They also are where I meet defeat in my importance/unimportance in their lives.  I used to walk into class and students listened.  I marked papers and gave out grades.  “Do you know, grandchildren, what your grades would be for today?”  I have wanted to ask.

Even in the early days, when I was writing at my small desk and my children were young, I felt the pull between work and children.  I want also to be there for my daughter, to give her a break now and then, to help her with her load.

Now, when there is a battle of the wills, I know it is their lives that are important.  Their road ahead.  I step back where I could have lead the class.  I could march into it, but instead I follow. What I have now is a departure from history.  A center that a grandmother had.  Not it is auxiliary.  It is beside the family.  They have their own lives.  I can contribute and not get in the way.   I give the reins to them.  It is the new definition of grandmother because I want them to be independent and responsible for themselves.  That is the new direction.  I have to let go.  I return to my house with relief.  I can sit at my word processor and write.  I can read.  I can go to the lake by myself.  I can get lost in my own projects, which is what I want to do for the afternoon.  I can plan for my next writer’s workshop.  I can pack for a trip.  I can still drive.  Sometimes I don’t see them for days.

My own maternal grandmother lived on a farm.  We had visits there in the 1940’s when I was growing up, but I remember her as distant.  Practical.  Once I took a chick into the farmhouse and was petting it when she saw me, and asked what I was doing with the inference I was silly.  It was a chick she later would behead with an ax for supper, when it was bigger and covered with white feathers.  I remember those little Ann Boleyns of the barnyard.  I have found my own beheading in giving up part of myself for my grandchildren.  I want to provide that presence for my grandchildren.  I want to have an awareness of themselves in the world.

Often, in the past, the Indian grandmothers named the children and had a definite authoritative role.  It is something I wouldn’t think of doing with the independent daughter and daughter-in-law I have.  It would cause trouble.  Resentment.  I feel I have information that sits at the center of the world, yet I am left with duties I have at the moment, shortening a penguin suit for my granddaughter for the current Halloween.  Last year, it was white feathers I sewed back onto her chicken costume when they kept falling off.   Sometimes, I also read to Libby and Charlie while they mother helps their older brother, Joseph, with his homework.

My purpose as grandmother is to cause fun to form in the daily routine, to distract from trouble, to console, to call to look up.  Sometimes I am aware of the weariness children feel as they move along in school, busier all the time with homework and activities: soccer, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, art lessons and all the dancing lessons for Libby, the doctor and dentist appointments, Cub Scouts and piano lesson.

When I take Libby to gymnastics and dancing lessons, I stand at the glass watching her.  She in turn, watches me to make sure I am watching what she can do.  If I look away a moment, she is at the glass to get my attention back to her.  I visit her pre-school.  I take her on errands.  I am a prop instead of the center pole.  It seems to me that is the way it should be.  It is worth the price.

Recently, when Charlie was sick and unable to go to a basketball game with his family, I sat with him while he cried in the misery of his illness and in being left behind.  I want to commiserate when his parents are too busy.  I want to be a spark, an incentive.  A light.  Being a grandmother is an act of prayer against the terror of the world, a grounding of faith for this solitary road.   It is the times I am overwhelmed with the noise and confusion, and have to withdraw to my quiet house.  I have had 25 years on my own.  But I want to stand up and join the battle.  I want to ignite. To call to journey.  To tell them, see how the petals of the orange roses on your mother’s table are like flames.

My grandchildren are in a new world.  I have to stand back and watch, as maybe my paternal grandmother saw me and remained silent.  It is the separation that holds us together.   I think of the secret things that will die in my world as the world of my father’s mother died with her.  The other day I wanted to call the grandchildren to watch a storm, but they were watching a video when all the mystery of the natural world passed by.

I have taken Charlie to the lake with me.  He is wedged between siblings, and needs a larger space at times, a space for himself.   I have seen him interrupted so often by older brother and younger sister, he gets frustrated and breaks out in anger when trying to say something.

At the lake, I have a Jon boat, which is a small, brown fishing boat, though I don’t fish, with a battery operated motor.  We explore the end of the cove.  When the water is low, there is a rocky shelf we call Charlie’s Island.  Usually it belongs to the ducks.  We motor there, a trip of two minutes from my dock.  We get out of the boat and walk the entire length of Charlie’s Island, four or so yards.  We throw rocks in the water.  They are more like pebbles.  We find a walking stick.  We move rocks around with the walking stick.  We talk.  I listen to every word he says.

Even when Charlie’s Island is underwater, we know the rocky shelf is there.

In a spirit dream, where all things are possible, I sew the fragments of pebbles into a small island.  My needle penetrates the rocks.  My threads hold them together.

The role of the grandmother is a rocky shelf.

Diane Glancy is professor emeritus at Macalester College.  Her 2009 books are The Reason for Crows, SUNY Press, a novel of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk converted by the Jesuits, and Pushing the Bear, After the Trail of Tears, the University of Oklahoma Press, that follows her 1998 novel of the Cherokee Trail of Tears.  She was the Visiting Richard Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in the winter semesters of 2008 and 2009.  This piece first appeared in Melusine's Fall 2009 issue.

Devon Ward-Thommes: Becoming the Pelican

During my second fall semester in college, the sorority house where I lived hosted one of the largest date functions on campus, “Assassins.”  Each couple was given the names of another couple – these were their victims.  The goal was to find your victims in the dark, and when you did, they were “killed” and called out of the game; the last remaining couple was the winner.  I don’t remember now what the prize was for winning, but I’m sure it came with lots of popularity and respect.  My roommates and I spent months preparing for it – all through September and October we talked about who we’d invite, what the best hiding places were, how to know your victims in the pitch black darkness.  One of my best sorority friends, a Korean girl named Sun, designed the t-shirt – black with white silhouettes of three skinny, big-breasted girls in mini-skirts and platforms holding guns like Charlie’s Angels framing the word ASSASSINS on the back.  We were so pumped for this shindig.

We decorated the dining hall with streamers and made “better than sex” cake – a dangerous concoction of vanilla ice cream, peanut butter, crumbled Oreos, and M&Ms all smothered with chocolate sauce – for our dates after the event; I certainly wouldn’t eat the stuff.  What I remember of the actual night is fuzzy, out of focus like a bad photograph.  My date was Andy Miguel, my beautiful Filipino boyfriend, star quarterback, secretary of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, student body president.  We wore our black shirts with pride, and painted our cheeks with stripes of greasy black paint like football players.  Everyone wore black bandanas, strips of cloth tied around their arms, anything to make them look bad-ass.  Then we turned off all the lights and the chaos commenced.
   
There were screams and heavy breathing and pounding footsteps down the hallways. I grasped Andy’s hand – my palms were sweaty – people were groping and gasping and screaming.  We hid under one of the bunk-beds in the dormitory for awhile, tried to distinguish feet running by, the sounds of people banging around in the dark.  We ventured out and ran through some rooms, and then hid in the costume closet, but that was all.  Soon, we heard some loud wailing, all the lights came on, and the game was called off.

The dining hall’s fluorescent lights were blinding.  People sat around on chairs, wiping sweaty foreheads and smearing their make-up.  At least two or three girls were crying – someone had a bloody lip, another girl had banged her forehead into the corner of a wall, the popular soccer player, Karen Lewis, had sprained her ankle.  Stacey mopped Liz’s bloody forehead, Megan blamed her boyfriend for her broken glasses, and they argued until he left, yelling angry words behind him.  I don’t remember where Andy was.  I sat in the corner, heart beating fast, watching the streamers sway and drift around all the angry, red-faced people.  Most of college was like this.


At nineteen, I still believed the truth was that not eating lunch, running a marathon, and joining the crew team would bring lasting happiness, the truth of who I really was.  If I just worked hard enough then all that pain would bring looser clothes, a flat stomach, pure, unadulterated satisfaction in hard work paid off.  I’d learned that beauty equaled happiness - thin, graceful, tan, toned beauty – the people I wanted to be inhabited the pages of Seventeen.  Some were even in my calculus class.  My peers who seemed happy all weighed less than 130 pounds; they had long, shiny, straight hair and big smiles and popular boyfriends. I thought if I could just control my frizzy curls and have one of those hard-ass stomachs, I would be well, and able to relax, and feel fully alive.  At nineteen, this is what I believed.

But I did know a few true things, underneath all the layers of spandex: I had the sneaky feeling that there was more to life than what I could see and hear and touch and taste.  I suspected that God probably existed among all of us stumblers.  And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time.  That’s what all the clothes, make-up, elliptical trainers, and string bikinis were all about.  I knew that I wasn’t alone in the dark – I could hear others fumbling around just as awkwardly as I was.  The trouble was that nobody knew where the light switch was.  Nobody even seemed to care.


By the time I joined the varsity lightweight crew team during the spring of my freshman year, I’d developed a curious and wildly ecumenical faith stitched from scraps I’d gathered in reading and participating in various wisdom traditions – Native American, Taoist, feminist, Buddhist, even Catholic, in those sweet, slow days cherry-picking with my ex-Catholic priest father, who taught me to meditate and believe that we are all sons and daughters of God, whoever that was.  According to him, she was most likely female.

My closest friends were my competitors – my best friend Annie Chesnut who turned anorexic our last year of high school, all the girls skinnier than me who rowed on the lightweight team, the sorority sisters who hoarded bagels and granola bars and never came to house meals, my popular, manipulative boyfriend.  What I didn’t know was that my strictest competitor (and my best teacher) would turn out to be the person I hated most – me and my body.

Before every crew regatta, we’d all had to weigh in, each girl peeling her jersey over her head and stepping on the scale.  Sonja, our team captain, weighed 132, two pounds over the lightweight cut-off.  So she ate only rice cakes the day before each weigh-in, and then spent hours dressed in five layers of clothing, sweating off the pounds on a stationary bike in the boathouse.  One time, she was just a sliver over – 130.4 pounds – so we’d all watched as another teammate took Sonja’s long cashew-colored hair in her left fist and a pair of scissors in her right, and sliced off the beautiful swishing bundle.  It turned out her hair weighed a measly .1 pounds.  She’d still not made weight, so she’d fasted all day in order to be allowed to row in the morning.

Although I’d started college 15 pounds over the cut-off, by that spring I weighed 122.  I had learned to multi-task: I took my reading homework to the gym.  I spent afternoons there sweating on the stair climber, trying to feed both parts of me – the curious student asking big questions about spirituality and the dissatisfied sorority girl who obsessed about exercise.  I must have seen some incongruity in this, reading about Jung and his collective unconscious while participating in the sad body image soup that was almost tangible in the steamy air, my fellow sorority sisters pedaling beside me, nose-deep in their Shape magazines.
    
Poetry often helped.  When I read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” or anything by Rumi, quick bursts of sunlight streamed through my darkness.  At those times I knew that if you had the eyes to see, there was beauty everywhere in nature, even when it rained spittle rain like God was sneezing, or when sewer stench rising from the river mixed with the sharp odor of wild onions.  I could even see beauty in my girlfriends with large, round bottoms.  I was just glad I didn’t look like them.  Even though I knew some truth somewhere in my body, it wasn’t what I wanted to believe.  I didn’t want to listen to wisdom, I just wanted to have a fast ergometer score, and to be thin.

This time was not so long ago – I was nineteen 7 years ago, a sophomore in college at a small school in Salem, Oregon, where the students were more conservative than the faculty, and ninety percent of social events happened at Greek houses.  I was a new member of Alpha Chi Omega, the jock sorority, I was the girlfriend of the hottest boy in school, and I went to Tuesday night Christian worship services during which young men with soulful eyes strummed guitars with gusto and fervent girls sang loudly, palms open, hands held up to heaven.  My friends were the ones who looked like they had the most fun – the ones who wore disco clothes to school and danced with abandon and laughed a lot.  They weren’t the ones drinking themselves sick every weekend.  They were mostly part of Campus Ambassadors, a large, evangelical Christian youth group.

For a few weeks during the fall, I met with three Campus Ambassador girls on Wednesday nights at 9:00 pm, down by the millstream.  We’d stand in a circle, hold hands, pray together, and tell each other our deepest secrets.  Beth Sweeney talked about how she was slowly beginning to eat again after a year of being too skinny and too sick.  She still wanted to be thin.  She knew it was a problem, but she was doing her best to be healthy.  She was taking a dance class, doing yoga and singing in a women’s choir.  She asked God for help a lot.  I stole glances at her in the moonlight, her bony fingers and painted toes laying atop foam flip-flops.  I understood the voice telling her that she would never be good if she was not thin.  The same harsh voice echoed in my ears, but I never told her that.  I talked about school and crew and Andy, and kept stealing glances at Beth’s waist.  I envied that waist.

Beth was one of my only Christian friends with an eating disorder.  Campus Ambassador parties always included lots of food, which everyone ate with gusto.  My best Christian friend Tracey started a club called Monday-Nice-Day.  Every Monday night, we gathered in a campus kitchen and baked treats – brownies, lemon bars, coconut macaroons, peanut butter bars – and handed them out to kids around campus, who, unlike us, were studying hard.  I nibbled these treats, licked the spoon when we were done, but always felt guilty afterwards.  According to those Christian girls, God was full of grace.  He spoke any time anywhere but could be heard most clearly on windswept beaches and wet forests, through morning fog and burning sunrises, places far away from asphalt and cars.  Christ wanted to be my savior, God wanted to accept me into heaven.  But this promise was not unconditional.  I had to believe that people were originally sinful, that Christ had died for my sin, and that only He, and no other god, could lead me to heaven.  At the service, following lyrics projected onto the overhead screen, I prayed to Jesus to speak to me.  I thought my heart was open, but no message ever came.  Most Tuesday nights after worship I ended up crying in my dorm room, frustrated that I didn’t fit into this nice group of people.  I just couldn’t stop asking questions.  What about all the other people in the world, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Jews?  Didn’t they have as much right to the truth as anybody?


For Christmas that year, my parents took me to Puerto Vallarta, where we visited Posada Roger, the hotel where they had stayed 25 years ago on their honeymoon.  From there, we traveled north up the coast to a small fishing village called Sayulita, famous for its long-haired surfers and ex-pat artists dwelling in clay-tiled bungalows scattered over the seaside hills.  Sayulita was a great place for rituals and celebrations – it was nearly as exotic as India, including the dying animals and polluted streams that smelled of defecation.  Dudes with rotting dreadlocks smoked hashish on cement porches, naked babes lounged on the beach, and feral cats dug in the garbage.  There were festivals almost every night – New Year’s fireworks, fire-breathers and gypsies in the town square selling hoop earrings and jingle-jangle bracelets.  Women in sarongs sipped martinis in the bars next to greasy men, children played with kittens along the cobblestones and corn fields, artists set up easels on the hilly roads, and surfers congregated in beach-side restaurants to gorge themselves on fried fish and flan.  There was the village church, full of candlelight and poinsettias and beatific, bleeding Christs, there were orgies and mangy dogs and belly-dancers and people in small bits of exotic clothing redolent of spirit and dreams – not to mention tacos grilling in the heat and left-out watermelon, so much juicy life oozing out around the edges.  It was enough to make me nauseous.

I got up every morning at 7:00 am for my hour-long run.  My parents noticed when I returned red-faced and sweaty and did not want to go downstairs for the abundant breakfast of salted and limed papaya, banana, watermelon, pastries from the corner bakery, perspiring flutes of orange juice.  They noticed when I left three quarters of all my meals on the table, the sticky flan attracting flies, and when I studied my profile carefully in the mirror before tying on a wrap-around skit and sliding a sweatshirt over my head for the beach.  I did most of this quietly, and they watched quietly, until my stomach aches got worse.  Every time I ate, my belly erupted into furious gurgles and grumbles, louder than my rare complaints.

At first we thought it was just turista, Montezuma’s revenge.  But my parents had seen me through a grueling year of lightweight crew racing; they knew about Sonja’s impromptu haircut.  The world is so full of pain, and it’s contagious around people you love.  I think my mother suffered more than I as she watched me run and pant and pick at my food.  She had always been my confidante.  But I didn’t want to talk to her about my body; I was listening to that voice residing in a deep, intimate place too tender to expose.  But we also loved to read together, so when her attempts to talk about things ended in more silence, she gave me a book for Christmas.

On the cover, rows of aspens stood out against a yellow background, the forest floor thick with their leaves.  The title, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, surprised me.  Was my mother saying I was falling apart?  Did she think I needed heart advice for difficult times?  When I first opened the package, my mother must have seen my distress at being given such a book; she said her secretary had recommended it, that she wanted to read it after me, that it wasn’t really as self-helpish as it seemed.  The picture on the back intrigued me – an American Buddhist nun dressed in maroon and yellow, shorn hair fuzzy around her head.  “Pema Chödrön is the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America established for Westerners,” I read, curiosity piqued.  One morning in Sayulita, I packed the book in my backpack and after my ritual profile-examination in the full-length mirror, headed to the beach.

I spread out my towel, whipped off my sweatshirt, and flopped down on my tummy lickety-split, so nobody would see my round white belly.  I lay there for awhile, watching all the tan, skinny girls around me brush sand from their oiled thighs and wave at their boyfriends, wet and salty in the pelican-strewn surf.  Then I took the book from my bag, careful to keep the title hidden from view, and started to read.  I don’t remember if I really hoped this book would help me, but I do remember how I was soon mesmerized, agape.  Pema Chödrön didn’t seem to say anything I didn’t already know about fear and truth and the present moment, but it was the first time I’d heard this information given in such a kind, funny, wise, human voice.  She spoke from that same dark, tender place where my neurotic voice resounded, but her message was gentle.  It said: relax.  Be kind to yourself.  You don’t need to do anything else, you’re already awake, precious, whole, and good.  I thought: of course, yeah, I knew that.  But now I could really believe this truth, this truth that spilled out in the quiet relationship between writer and reader.

As I read about calm abiding meditation, that profound practice of watching the breath, I noticed my belly pushing against my ribs, the sand beneath me every time I inhaled.  My body responded viscerally to this wisdom, I felt each cell settle and stretch, feeling itself as if for the first time.  People say about experiences like this that “the veil lifted,” but for me, it was as if I’d been clutching the edge of a cliff and I’d just let go into space.  But it wasn’t a scary free-fall, it was a loosening into innate freedom, space that had been there all along.  Pema Chödrön wrote about discovering what is brilliant and confused in our own hearts, about what is bitter and sweet, and how when we discover ourselves, we discover the universe.  And I felt as though my lungs had just doubled their capacity for breath, for inspiration.

I read all afternoon, belly down on my towel, toes curling in the sand.  There was only me, the book, the sun warming the earth; sunglasses on the sweaty bridge of my nose, the smell of sunscreen, the shush of pages turning, the occasional shift of light or limb.  The wrinkly flower of my heart was opening in slow motion.  I felt I was universes away from those women sprawled on their towels a little ways off.

Pema Chödrön said meditation is a good idea.  So I did it.  I began meditating every morning, right before going out on my run.  I would sit cross-legged on the brick patio of Tía Adriana’s Bed and Breakfast, palm fronds striping shadows across my legs, and I’d listen to my breath, feeling my stomach push in and out, just like Pema said to do.  When my mind got all tangled and distracted, I tried to relax with whatever arose.  I said “thinking” in my mind, and tried to come back to the breath.  I felt air scrape against the inside of my nostrils, my dried-out lips slightly open with the tongue touching the roof of my mouth.  My parents observed me without saying much; I think they were relieved, maybe bemused by my sudden change of habit.  Sometimes I sat with my running shoes on, afraid I would not go running if I was not completely prepared beforehand, like somehow my meditation would calm me down enough to see the truth I did not want to see.  I was afraid that if I saw truth I would accept myself for how I was at that moment, which would mean eating a chocolate bar instead of running, and then just getting fatter and more miserable again.

One day I went running in the afternoon.  In the golden light, I ran past watery-eyed cows and dull-eyed men hanging out at the local bull-fighting ring.  I ended up at the beach.  I felt sick to my stomach, sick of how it stuck out against my tank-top if I did not hold it in, sick of the garbage and dirty dogs and rotting fish all over this god-forsaken paradise.  I went down to the water and sat on some big boulders and watched large black pelicans fishing.  They were humongous, more like pterodactyls than birds, wings stretched reptilian against the sky, and then boom!  They’d jack-knife and plummet toward the waves, beaks wide and scissor-like.  God knows what I’d do if one of those things came at me like that.  After scooping up their catch, they’d settle on the waves, scuttling their feathers back into place, like everything was hunky dory.  No cause for concern, no big deal, I’m fine, everything’s just fine.  Not like I just took the biggest hara-kiri bullet-trajectory path out of the air from twenty feet up and just landed with a PLOOSH in the waves, mouth full of fish.  No, no big deal.

I cried big, heaving sobs, snot running down with sweat and tears into my cleavage as I watched those birds dance.  And then when I was done crying, God was everywhere.  I breathed God in the wind, tasted divine salt on my lips, looked down to see God’s hands resting on God’s skinny legs, blotchy and red from running.  God pounded out rhythms in my chest, and when I looked down at the sandy shells at my feet, there God was staring back at me, from eyeballs protruding on long antennas on a frightened, side-stepping crab.  I collected as many of the purple and orange half-shells as I could and made my way back to Tía Adrianas, white teary flakes still sticking to my cheeks.

That was the day I pecked a hole out of my dark eggshell and saw the world full of birds and fishes, the parts of God that would guide my spiritual path.  This was the day I knew the ingredients that would serve me – wind, water, love, color, prayer, meditation, community.  I knew that resurrection of the heart was possible.

I started praying, not the usual old prayer of “God, send me a sign” or “God, may I be thinner,” but new ones – like just feeling the scrape of my breath or the stretch of my hamstring and delighting in sensation.  The divine was everywhere whether we called it God or Goddess or Buddha nature, poor old Buddha nature, just waiting for me to notice and say hello.  Pema Chödron said “what makes self-kindness such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem.  We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person.  In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart,” and I finally understood that this was no platitude.  People were going to come into my life.  Many of them would leave.  Most of the people, even my family and close friends, would roll their eyes and laugh nervously when I mentioned meditating or anything Buddhist.  My sorority friends would stop calling when I moved out the next semester.
    
My parents weren’t there when I got back to the bed and breakfast, so I went into our room, spread out a towel, and did 200 sit-ups and 60 push-ups, half on my knees.  It would be two more years before I took vows of refuge and officially became a Buddhist student, three years before I went on pilgrimage to India and began 100,000 prostrations in the traditional preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism.  Seven years after that day with God and the pelicans on the beach, I sat down to write this story.  But I still remember sitting up from that dirty towel, stretching my quads and calves, and then walking out onto the veranda to watch the sun go down beneath a hazy veil.  I felt euphoric and exhausted, as if I’d just plummeted right out of that dark sky, eyes wide and black wings spread, and hit the water with a crash.


Devon Ward-Thommes is a graduate of George Mason University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction program.  She has previously published in Willamette University's Precision Munitions, a journal of French poetry translations called Rien Rien, and Spirituality and Health magazine.  Her translation of Véronique Tadjo's book-length poem, Halfway, is due out from HOST Publications this year.  She currently lives and works at a Tibetan Buddhist Retreat Center in southern Colorado devoted to honoring the sacred feminine.  This piece first appeared in Melusine's Summer 2009 issue.