Saturday's Child: Raising Arizona, Hope, and Me

First of all, let me tell you that my love of Raising Hope has only a very little to do with the fact that it stars the not-whiny gal from The Goonies all grown up. When I was a kid my parents loved Raising Arizona, and I remember just finding it awkward and embarrassing in its near depiction of my own awkward, embarrassing family. Which isn't to say my mom and dad wanted for kids enough to go around thieving them, but still. These folks were poor and inarticulate and taken advantage of. They weren't so much real people as caricatures, and when paired with their socioeconomic equals on Married With Children, I was made more than a little bit uncomfortable.

Hope's family is poor and rowdy and none too bright but they love the shit out of each other, and for me that is the strongest narrative thread in the series. My love of queering the traditional family delights, too, in the role reversal of Jimmy's parents. His father is the one who needs to be hugged, who cries, who shelters him, and his mother plays at sympathies she sometimes simply doesn't have. For all of the outlandishness somehow tidily resolved by the end of an episode, these crazy folks are real and I love them.

Just like my folks are real and crazy and I love them.

Super Sad True Love Story

Let me tell you about the look on his face. Seated at his computer desk with his back to me, I contemplated the slope of his shoulders and the weight of the news I carried, literally. More than wand-thin plastic and the slimmest of fruit seeds, this was big news, belly-big, big as our little life increased by some mathematical factor he wouldn't have time to explain anymore to me.

So I said what I didn't think I'd be saying so soon after I kicked the habit, and let me tell you, the look on his face. Let me tell you about it.

"Really?"

My husband is a man of secret giddiness, but this expression had no secrets. Full and open as a book, no, a drawing of a book so fat-full of pages you could never close it again. He took me on his lap, he repeated himself. I repeated myself. Our grins fell together like lovers in bed when we kissed.

For less than a week we were having a baby. And then, all of a sudden, we weren't.

There wasn't any pain, only the heart-choking sobs that hiccuped out of me when I thought too hard about it, which I tried not to do. I reasoned crying and writing about it in private, and have resisted for months even talking about it with the few who knew by necessity of when I got the news, and how. All of my adult life I haven't wanted to talk about being a girl. The paranoia that accompanied any mention of my wedding when we were getting married carried over quite naturally into any mention of wanting to start a family, for fear of seeming like someone I wasn't, or worse, wanting to be someone who mightn't be respected. It doesn't make sense. Most things I think don't.

But this happened, and my heart is a telling heart, a showing heart, a sharing one. I wanted you to know.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I have lots of Halloween stories I like to tell. Here's one. Though my mother attests that I went as Punky Brewster for three Halloweens in a row as a very young girl, the first costume I remember was the Queen of Hearts. Maybe I liked her demanding aesthetic, maybe Alice was just too much of a wimp, maybe I just wanted a crown and a big ass dress and a scepter heavy on the hearts. At six years old, I suspect it was entirely the last.

My parents, being the clever and thrifty folks that they were, put a lot of time and effort into my costume and it was a secret to me until the day before the Halloween parade at school. While the other girls would be wearing flimsy plastic masks and store bought tunics that tied like hospital gowns over their school clothes, I would have an ensemble. I'd seen the crown my parents had made for me, adapting a New Year's Eve party hat, hearts bobbing and glittered gold letters in my mother's hand announcing my title. What I hadn't seen was the sandwich board to be affixed above my shoulders, the Queen of Hearts painstakingly rendered by my dad, a damn fine likeness of your standard Bicycle playing card. I was mortified, but it was too, too late to do anything about it. My rebellion against the costume extended only so far as refusing to take off my jean skirt at the school parade, for leotard and tights or no, my modesty would not permit me to go about with nothing but cardboard and a layer of red nylon between me and my classmates.

In retrospect I find their efforts brilliant and wish I had the costume still, or at least a photograph of it. We made our costumes every year, later favorites including a ghost from a story I'd liked on Unsolved Mysteries, a gypsy draped in my mother's shawls from high school homecoming dances, and, taking advantage of my wild hair in early adolescence, the Bride of Frankenstein.

My brother and I would run from house to house in neighborhoods much nicer than ours, always prepared with two pillow cases for when the first one became full. No paltry pails for us. I had no patience for cousins when we suffered trick or treating in groups, when they became whiny or tired or refused to commit to our breakneck speed. Clearly, they did not understand that we had only three hours to acquire as much free candy as we could. Each street we failed to visit was one less house with a fog machine and grave stone dotted yard that we would miss, a teenager leaping from a leaf burial to  make us shriek, a porch veiled in black garbage bags promising mystery. And candy. Did I mention the candy?

Halloween always was and still is my favorite holiday. What's yours?

Touch of Grey

I found my first grey hair. Like a fat-toothed comb my fingers parted hairs until I could pluck it free, be sure it wasn't paint or light or my eyes playing tricks in the sterile fluorescence of the bathroom. But the hair was silvered pale, delicate as thread, and I sealed it reverently in a plastic container to show my husband when he came home. He wasn't as convinced as me, though my evidence of age is very little when compared with his salt and peppering beard. "It looks white."

"Maybe I'll go white instead of grey."

That could be pretty bitchin', to have a few Rogue years between my sorry youth and sure to be sorrier middle age. That's more of a dream, I think, than thinking that one won't sprout in time one hundred.

Before I threw it out I twirled it once, twice, three times around my finger, less than I would have been able to after a recent hair cut. I'm nearing the end of my twenties, but for all I regret at their passing I have more to look forward to, more ahead than I have behind. A writing professor I had as an undergraduate, a man I admired greatly and for shame have yet to read, mused to me that I might have only one really good story in me as a young person, and that perhaps I had already told it. But more would come, later. He was of the opinion that most people were not worth reading until they were in their thirties, even if they'd been writing for years. I didn't balk at the idea at the time and I don't now, either, because I know that I always have more work to do. I can only hope to be given the time to do it.

And with NaNoWriMo but a few days away, the many kicks in the pants I need to keep from squandering my last year as a twenty-something on World of Warcraft.

The Good That Men Do

There are two men in my life who love me. The first today hugged me hard enough to break my back. It has been a few months since we have seen each other and saw each other today only because we were together for a wake for my uncle, for him the man who had been like a second father to him, his sister's husband, his friend. My father had a beer in one hand, eyes yellowed with unshed tears and though he talked and talked there were many things he didn't say. His pride in me is like a brand, or maybe it is more like the tattoo he gave himself as a too-young man, the hot needle prick of ink persisting forever. For me it says remember, remember, remember where you came from.

And I always will remember, because despite the fact that I've taken the name of the second man for my own, I've chosen to publish with both, when I do.

Tonight I dropped a tea tray on my foot. The clatter and cursing were more serious than the wound warranted, but my husband was up and out of his office chair in an instant, teasing with me only when he'd established that the hurt was not severe. Still I strip my tights and he cleans my busted big toe over the sink, bandages with the light pressure of his thumbs and forefingers. Before I met him I would've let fingers and toes rot off before I'd waste a bandage, but I've grown more fond of his careful attention in moments like these than I have my own limbs.

"You might lose the nail," he warns, brows arched in all seriousness. "It'll take years to grow back."

At least I'll have good company.

False Starts

In one of my creative writing workshops, before I gave up on giving a damn, the instructor distributed to us in our first hour together a weighty stapled packet including eleven different first pages of a novel she'd recently sold. Green all over girl that I was, I couldn't fathom how her story could change so much from one beginning to the next. Now, of course, I can only think I'd hang myself after eight. Sometimes I begin writing here without being sure about what I want to say, only that I must say something. That's how I approach my writing some evenings, too, but the gut-gulping feeling that drives me to story tell is so much different than blog talk. I'm not guaranteed a listener in either case, but I've got no one to answer to but myself if I don't.

So I thought I'd share a few false starts to blogs, words dangling like heads from broken necks or legs, conversations I haven't quite decided how to have with you yet. Or with myself.

I didn't work out today but I consumed more than my fair share of carbohydrates. The precious hours between work and the listless dark I spent writing instead, eating French bread and drinking iced Thai coffee, penning a world absent of both (and other luxuries, for all the boys are handsome and the gals daring). I realize I'm really avoiding querying by insisting on getting a start on the second novel, but among the many promises I'm making myself is that I'll only live delusions for a little while.

Like the fact that I'll exercise every day when my quota of responsible things I'm doing as an adult is met utterly by arriving to work on time, eating fruit for breakfast, loading the dishwasher, flossing after I brush. How can I keep up with what I ought to be doing when I'm too busy doing it in halves, when there's the internet? I'm a kid rushing through my homework so I can go outside and play.

Lying in bed listening to Regina Spektor croon about how it's alright, alright, alright (that everyone can't have everything) I find that it is only too appropriate that my expensive pajamas are matched but wrinkled, that one ear bud dangles free so I can hear my husband  brush and floss and bemoan the sore throat I've given him. If I can still delight for so little done right I know I've got growing up to do.

If I plan to write for a living I know I can't ever grow up too much.

Perhaps the moment passed for this one. It's still true.

Returned from Chicago to the most desperate of cats and dishes I should've known to do before I left. My dreams of eating things like Toaster Strudel while I am alone this week were shattered by the fact that they weren't on sale at the grocery store, so I bought bagels and cream cheese and fruit and whole grain, organic fruit loops. Today I consumed half-meals when I was hungry and cleaned the kitchen when I wasn't.

This isn't what it's like to live alone, I know. I have more space than I need for just me and mess leftover for two. It's quiet because I'm afraid of leaving the windows open with nothing between me and suburban hooligans but thin screens, but I can hear birds and buzzing things and distant vehicles like muffled televisions through the walls. I turn on the television when it gets too quiet.

What I wanted to say, I think, was that I'm boring.

To friends on Saturday night I readily admitted my eagerness to turn twenty-nine this year, to be eventually thirty-five and "have my shit together." Whether that will be the case or no, my twenties are not exactly what I would consider to be free-wheelin' years. I've spent most of them "in" things: in college, in debt, in the shit with my family.

The woman I'm made today considers a day spent responsibly a day well spent, a day of domestic comfort among the highest I can claim.

Still true. Still boring.

Though I reached the realization years ago that what I missed most about my family was intrinsically tied to being a child and belonging to a family, the heartache is staggering still, sometimes, especially when I think that I will surely someday want a family of my own.

I remember keenly the use of the word disown in my

Family. The comforts of writing and friends and hot drinks, memories rock candy crunchy. There's as much of me in what I haven't finished as in what I have.

Whiskers

You know how dreams sometimes combine the elements of your day(s) in odd ways? That's how I write poems, when I write poems. Lover, in the bath you grip me like a cat, my domestic airs forgotten as the water meets my hips before my toes are dipped. Shed hairs tickle your lips but you can't hold me down and brush them from your face without risking losing it if I should decide to scratch instead of splash.

Pilgrim's Progress

Met my goal tonight on the second novel and stopped writing with the muse(s) still chattering. It's been a little over a month since I finished edits on Book of Icons (now that you know that it has a name, that makes it legit), and I've received a response from every agent and publisher I queried. I'll say one thing for rejections in this season: they're awful timely. Grieved as I was a few days ago when I received the last one (and those of you unlucky enough to have befriended me on Facebook and suffer live action roleplaying photographs as well as childish rants, forgive me), there was one line in particular from the letter that made me feel something totally inappropriate: triumph. The publisher claimed that they did not feel my novel would be a "commercial success" in the current market. It's a form letter and I'm not taking it (too much) to heart, but I can't help but feel that when I look at the current market, when I discard book after book after book after only three chapters reading, that while of course I'm writing because I want to be read, I'd rather it were for the right reasons, by the right people. If to be commercially successful I've got to scrap whimsy (which isn't to say I believe that I do), I'm not gonna. I joke big time about writing lusty vampire fiction because it seems to me when agents say they want fantasy they don't mean epic, and when they do, they want Robert Jordan. But while there are some gals who are writing urban fantasy in a seriously spectacular way, those aren't the dreams I'm dreaming.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make money, didn't want to make it big. But I can't be something I'm not, can't write what my heart isn't in. And for now, it's this story, this girl who is more than she appears to be and more still. It's spinning folktales fat as spiders that in turn spin themselves, my cob-webbed brain resurrecting all of the things that I love best about living and reading, licking and sticking and pinning them on the page like postage stamps or luna moths. I'm writing for me. For now.

Layover

If there's one thing I like about airports and air travel (and after six delays and seven unexpected hours in Atlanta, there may only be one thing), it's seeing people reading. I can finish books by train or car or plane without the struggle of distraction at home, and when smart phones and iPads and laptops are stowed, I'm always pleasantly surprised to see that others can, too. There's something about turning pages that transports to destinations unintended, and I want to watch the twitch of lips and brows braided in consternation and wonder. It's sexy and secret and spine-cracking, words the most refined of fuels to be had in any terminal. I never ask anyone what they're reading but I like to guess. The two are equally intrusive, but I make no excuses for my book voyeurism.

Should I allow myself two things to like about flying, the second would be reaching that altitude between the clouds and the hot blue atmosphere, the sun a blazing yoke.  Better yet at night, fuzzy and soot-deep, the moon velvet-swaddled and shining. It makes me want to write about space. Or start working out regularly so I can be an astronaut. Or live another life as a girl from the future.

None of these things is anything like the other.

Where have you been lately, on purpose or by accident?

(Hot) Flash: Daddy Played Bass

For this I googled "chambers of the heart." Better title? Maybe. It was after her third miscarriage that she decided to have an affair.

She picked the bass player, not because he was unassuming or sulky the way she imagined most bass players to be, but because he had a beard bolting new-red along his jaw. The color made her think he must be younger than she was, even if she couldn't guess by how much. It was like buying herself a birthday present, choosing him, eyes saddling his frame the way his hips did his guitar.

There wouldn't be any other birthdays to celebrate, besides.

The bar without her husband was like learning to dance again, but discovering she had only one leg, or three. Her lipstick spotted smoke against the glass of Malbec she lifted and pressed against her mouth, pressed and put down again without drinking. The bass player swilled something bottled and microbrewed on stage, his right foot braking against the amplifier pedal. For her the motion was something else, all four chambers of her heart flooded with gasoline, left atrium pumping poison, ventricle sucking off. Her blood moved, the bleeding that should've stopped but hadn't inking her panties in a language she couldn't understand. Her body talked. She didn't listen.

The bass player leapt from the stage at the close of their set and she rose, smoke and light catching in the hollows of her cheeks, her eyes, the places where once she'd had feeling. Her husband would forgive her. She'd already forgiven herself.