In prepping for a writing panel I was thinking about what I know about story that might be useful to other writers.  I love stories.  On a good writing day I love writing stories and I’ve written a lot of them – short stories, poems, essays, a novel.  No matter which genre, what sustains my interest is a strong story line.  My poetry is usually narrative poetry.  Even in an essay I tend to tell a story.

One thing I know is that stories that don’t end up in the basket and especially stories that get published are the ones that really interested me while I was inventing them. Beyond interest something about the story not only held my attention, but challenged and intrigued me because some aspect – why a depressed man becomes suddenly elated, how religious affiliation affects sexuality, how a neighborhood reacts to a death – something about the story confused me.  There was something I didn’t get and wanted to better understand.

I often write about illness, class, and sexuality.  Sometimes I write about being a nurse or a mother or a lesbian.  That is to say, I usually write what I know.  To keep me interested, besides the layer of what I know there has to be a layer I don’t know.  When I read, much of the pleasure comes from the unfolding as the story is being read.  And it works the same when inventing a story.  The joy, struggle, frustration, and a big chunk of the work is in getting the story to unfold, to reveal something about what initially confused me, to discover something in the act of creating.

So, unconsciously or not, the story that’s going to keep me interested and writing also perplexes me.  It’s the discovery in the writing that drives me.  I function not so much under the old chestnut “write what you know” as much as “explore what confuses you.”

The best examples of writing that interested and confused me are from The Girls Club a novel that took 20 years to get published.  If you’re going to pick up and put down a looong story for a couple decades, taking time out to make a living, raise a kid, do the laundry, complete other writing projects, and wallow in your dissatisfaction about not getting the story right, as I did, but keep coming back to that same story, you have to be mighty interested in your questions and confusions about the story.  You better have a fire in your belly to tell the tale and be curious about what’s working and what is not working in the story.  You better be ready to ask a whole lot of questions.

Throughout the novel three sisters harass and defend each other.  The shame of the protagonist Cora Rose as she deals with her disease and sexuality is front and center.  The question “Why do people purposely humiliate each other?” kept poking me.  While attempting to answer this question I recognized that, being human, every character in the novel faced humiliations.  In one scene, after an exchange of insults, Cora Rose is shamed in front of their young sons when her sister Marie pins her to the carpet.  By the time the last draft was written the sisters and their kids were not as badly shaken as I thought they would be when I first imagined the scene.  In fact the sisters come to an understanding of sorts.  As the story got written and the development of this scene influenced others scenes the humiliation question became refined to “Why do some people survive and even learn from humiliations while other people get crushed by them?” I “literally” had to pin the protagonist to the floor to get to this question.  In a story you can get to questions by any means necessary – pin people to the ground, kill them, leave them alone in a cave for 10 years until they give up the information.

I also know the downsides to this “ask questions that interest and confuse you” method of story making.   Three-quarters of the way through my novel the protagonist, a 22 year old mother of a five year old son, estranged from her husband, failing in nursing school, and impoverished is tested by her son’s bad behavior.  When I come to this scene the story was yelling at me, robbing my sleep, making me cry because I couldn’t find the right way to finish the scene or rather I was hiding from it, because somewhere as a storyteller I knew that this woman was going to snap, this person who wanted to be a good parent was going to do something bad.

So as a writer what did I do?  I did the laundry.  I called my mother.  Anything to avoid making the poor diseased confused young woman wail on the little guy with the Dutch Boy bangs.  But sooner, or in this case later, the desire to tell the story got stronger than the desire to run away from the story.  The conflict demanded attention, the story’s questions about why and how good parents snap and how we then go on got answered or at least examined.  And the story finally moved forward.

Another frustration is that even fabulously interesting scenes, ideas, or plot points have to belong to the specific story a writer is telling.  Once you set up a world and characters you have to stick to what makes sense to what you’re creating, what moves that specific story, cause and effect has to build on cause and effect has to be integral to the characters relationships.  Every damn thing about the story, the environment, the tone, the language, has to move the story along.  We all know this but it’s really hard to execute.  So hard when you work your butt off on a scene and the answer to the question “Does this scene belong in this story?” is no. So hard to stick to the story in our stories.

I once wrote a story about a man having a seizure.  Because I’m a nurse who worked for decades with folks who have seizures I was having a good time showing off in writing what I knew about seizures. I was enthralled by my knowledge of the many ways tonic clonic jerks can manifest in different people, the way the veins bulge and the challenges of setting up an IV during status epilepticus, the relative merits of 80 percent versus 100 percent oxygen.  You bored yet?  Well, this actually interested me, but the over-telling impeded the plot and bored the readers in my writing group.  The questions I had about how a person in seizure feels, how the nurse feels, and the aftermath of the seizure were of more interest to readers and in the end more interesting to me.

The last example I have is also a near-mistake that almost made it into the novel.  This is a scene involving a dump.  I became enthralled with dumps and thought why not have Cora Rose and her estranged husband take the Christmas tree that caused their son to have a life-threatening asthma attach to the dump.  I became very attached to this scene, the setting I especially loved, loved the mood, the detail of the crows flapping their wings above the mound of dead appliances.  I had to ask myself basic questions “Why are these two in a dump?  What’s it got to do with this story?”  I had no answers not even the intuitive answer “Because it feels right.”  These two characters did not belong together in a dump at this point, or any point, in the story.  The imagery was overloaded.  The dialogue was pointed and false.  But I kept trying to make it work until finally I listened to a respected reader (thank you, Susan Stinson) and my own good sense and took the scene out of the novel.  Eventually I stuck two other characters in the dump and a different story, still a story of a couple arguing in a dump, started to make sense and in fact became Fishwives, the basis of a collection of short stories, in progress, as we say.

Having finished the novel, did I come to any conclusions about the nature of overcoming humiliation?  Well, yes, partial answers about support systems, luck, endurance, culture and individual response.

Maybe writers who want to write better stories need to ask more interesting questions and readers need to be willing to be left with interesting questions when the story ends.  The world is complex.  The best questions may never get fully answered, not in literature, not in life.   Questions, so many interesting questions.

   Here are the words of barrett:

You could have colored me Tickled with any number of bright, shiny colors when Sally Bellerose invited me to do a blog tour.

“The Girls Club,” Sally Bellerose? “The Fish Wives,” Sally Bellerose?

Yep, that Sally Bellerose.

Well, heck fire, count me in!

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re now entering ‘Daunting’ territory . . .

What can I possibly talk about that will be of the slightest interest to her readers?

Believe me when I tell you that my always-opinionated barrel of sock monkeys hotly debated that question for couple of weeks.

After much discussion and flinging about of ideas and . . . other things . . . it was agreed by a vote of 27-1 (there’s always one sock monkey that has to play Devil’s Advocate) that I should take the tried and true approach of “write what I know”.

So, unless anyone has a burning desire to learn about the correct procedure for inserting an indwelling Foley Catheter, explaining the necessity of the HIPPA standard, following the algorithm for Coumadin dosage, or maintaining a sterile field….

It means talking about my work in progress, or WIP (as it is known in the trades).

My fascinating Biography is available on both my site: http://www.wordsofbarrett.wordpress.com and my publisher’s site http://www.affinityebooks.com. For brevity sake, though, let me just say I’m a retired Registered Nurse living in the high desert of New Mexico. And, while I’ve been writing for about 13 years, I never considered publishing until about three years ago.  Since that moment, let me assure you, it has been one heck of a white-knuckle roller coaster ride.

Sometime back in 2009, I sat down to write a simple romance. Ha!

That “simple romance” is now under contract for a four book series, and I’m not entirely sure there’s an end in sight. Damaged in Service, Book One of the Damaged Series, was published in July 2011; and Book Two, Defying Gravity is scheduled for publication in the first quarter of 2012.

The remaining two books will follow to complete the original Damaged Series story arc.  However, I, personally, believe that Zeke Cabot and Anne Reynolds are fascinating and enduring characters, so I’ll leave it up to them to tell me at the conclusion of the Damaged Series if they have more stories to share with their readers.

If you’re not yet familiar with Damaged in Service, the cliff-notes version of the saga, reads like this…

Zeke Cabot is a seasoned and well-regarded special agent with the FBI’s Chicago Field office. Toward the end of her tour, she endured a grueling two-month undercover investigation to locate a serial killer. Events during that assignment affected her physically, mentally, and emotionally.

An extended medical leave/vacation finds her in the central mountains of New Mexico.

Anne Reynolds, a once sought after highly skilled surgical nurse, is now a shamed divorcee following a highly publicized scandal involving her husband and the city government.

The paths of these two women cross several times before either of them recognizes the underlying chemistry.

Once they connect, the inevitable questions, self-doubts, and teasing begins. They’re both mature enough to recognize the possibilities—both good and bad.

Just as they take the cautious first steps at romance, Zeke’s professional demons reappear, threatening not only their romance, but also their lives. Unanswered questions and a call to return to Chicago leave both women confused.

Book Two, Defying Gravity, begins in Chicago . . .

Someone wants something from Zeke, and is coming after her. Her only recourse is to review loose ends from her closed case in an effort to find whoever is after her and what they want.

One the romance front, both Zeke and Anne acknowledge their mutual attraction and ultimate desire to be together. So, when Zeke finally returns to New Mexico, she and Anne navigate the first steps of a shared life.

Of course, new love, new jobs, coming to terms with a new sexuality, emotional family crises, and the continued specter of danger throws Zeke and Anne off balance time and again.

Beyond that, the sometimes silent, always lurking reality of Zeke’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) keeps her physically and emotionally on quaking ground. Anne knows it. Zeke knows it. Yet, it remains the chain-smoking elephant in the room.

Quasi-spoiler alerts for Books Three and Four of The Damaged Series . . .

Book Three amps up the action, the danger, and the romance

Book Four will bring peace in resolution to the valley.

As I mentioned earlier, I started writing a simple romance.

But what happened along the way was a surprising revelation for me. The thing is, it’s not about the romance.  What I found is that I have deep and growing concerns for the men and women in our country suffering from PTSD.

You see PTSD doesn’t just affect members of the armed forces, medical professionals, and first responders. There are thousands of people suffering in silence because PTSD is a lasting consequence of traumatic events that cause intense fear, helplessness, or horror, such as a sexual or physical assault, the unexpected death of a loved one, an accident, natural disaster, loss of a job or a home, or any other number of triggers. Families of victims can also develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

Those suffering from PTDS don’t look any different from you or me. They may not be physically disfigured, may have no visible signs at all. And yet, on a daily basis some small, unexpected memory, event, sound, or sight can trigger intensely powerful and unpredictable emotional responses.

These responses have an amazing ability to dismantle thought, logic, and reason.

My character, Zeke Cabot is suffering from PTSD – it affects her job, her relationships, and her self-confidence. Her case is milder than many, yet more severe than others. Her response is the underlying theme for this entire series.

Here is the Prologue from Damaged In Service – it provides a glimpse of Zeke’s inner demons:

Prologue

The abandoned building is dank and reeks of urine. Sounds of dripping water and scurrying feet cause her to halt, mid-step, on the stairs. Then, running down the corridor, listening for every unfamiliar sound, she reminds herself the job is to locate another of the missing homeless men.

The only light filters through grime and cobwebs on the large broken windows. The only recognizable sound is the soft snoring of the building’s few illegal inhabitants.

Her heart pounds in her throat as her legs propel her through the frightening dark corridors.

A stark white lab coat appears in flashing glimpses just ahead and always out of her reach.

Then another flash of light, a new scene, a body wrapped neatly in plastic, lying beside a dumpster—headless and handless, taunting her.

Move. Keep running. Don’t stop. The deafening sound of screeching brakes and a looming truck grill bearing down. Fade to black.

This nightmarish loop of suffering never ends. Helpless frustration. Physical exhaustion. And always-smelly clothes, unwashed hair, and the sparse diet of discards.

This has to stop, just too tired to go on.

Her body aches and her mind spins like a tightly wound gyroscope.

The ominous scene fades to black again as another opens. She finds herself standing in an unfamiliar sterile-looking laboratory, this time it’s a long narrow walk-in cooler. She feels chilled and strong icy fingers tug at her weakened determination now racked with foreboding.

The shelves beside her contain plastic boxes, each with a bright white label and a contrasting black serial number.

Even knowing what she’ll find, she reaches for the closest box and in slow motion removes the lid. The strong stench of formaldehyde strikes first, gagging her. Bulging eyes in a pasty, bluish grey face are staring back at her. It is the familiar countenance of her friend and physician. This woman should never have been involved. Never.

A loud scream.

Zeke sat up suddenly, breathing rapidly, awakened by the sound of her own voice. Her worn FBI tee shirt clung to her damp, trembling body. She could smell the dank building, the urine, the formaldehyde, and her own nervous sweat. Her body shook as she covered her mouth to stifle a deep sob. The recurring nightmare is terrifying because of the too real and too recent events.

She got out of the comfortable, warm bed and stumbled across the room to patio doors that opened wide onto a balcony. Cool clean air swept across her still damp face and ruffled her hair. Burnished yellow moonbeam fingers stretched across the waters of Lake Michigan.

The months-long undercover hunt for a serial killer was over and the indicted murderer safely detained. Zeke needed to focus all of her energy on restoring her damaged body and soul to a state of readiness for active duty status.

Sadness permeated every cell and with another deep breath, she choked off the next sob. She felt so broken she didn’t know if she’d ever find herself again.

It is my dream that Zeke recover and provide us the “Happily Ever After” or HEA, as we writers like to say.  As the author of the Damaged Series, I should be able to guarantee that, but the thing is, PTDS lessens over time but it never truly goes away.  Zeke is a strong woman, and Anne is determined to be there with her through thick and thin.  Still, they have a long way to go and a lot of hurdles to jump individually and together on their way to the HEA.

Thank you for stopping by Sally’s blog space and taking the time to read my thoughts.

If you’re interested in reading Damaged in Service, please leave a comment on this post, and we’ll randomly select one for a complimentary copy.

Damaged in Service by Barrett is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and via the Affinity e-Book Press website.

Lastly, I want to offer my most sincere thanks to Sally, for being a most generous and gracious hostess, Marianne Martin and the Bywater Books staff for this opportunity, and to the wonderful folks at Affinity e-Books Press for taking a chance on Zeke and Anne.

~ Barrett

Sarah is one of my favorite bloggers and she happens to be local.  I love her writing for the way she manages to convey the politics and emotions of complex situations in clean understandable language.  She makes us all smarter.  And as a grandmother, I often feel comforted or at informed by her words.

Sarah is a writer who contributes regularly to Preview Massachsetts Magazine, & also has written for Brain Child, Huffington Post & Babble amongst other places.  She is also a community activist & mama to four kids, preschool to tenth grade.

Toes and  Boys and Girls

Last week,  at the toeholders’ request, I painted twenty toenails a nearly invisible pink.
My toeholder is three-and-a-half-plus, and her friend is about to turn four,  which means my gal is now leaning into her personal near-fourness (February).  The girls were thrilled with their pinkish toenails. They wiggled their toes.  They admired their very pale pink toenails. They went off to do other leaning-into-four things, mostly, I think, playing family. I heard snippets;  there were loads of timeouts.

Last spring, her pal, Sammy had painted toenails constantly. Youngest of three, with two big sisters, he also came to school sporting tutus over his pants. His (female) friend Saumya began wearing dresses to “be like Sammy.” And back when her older brothers were similarly small, our then-housemate, Michael often painted his toenails—and so our little boys loved nail polish, too. We used to joke about the male bonding that occurred over nail polish.

The truth is, though, that my gal—and her pals—is often making statements like this these
days: “Girls are princesses,” or “That jacket is pink and pretty so it’s for girls.”

Before I dissolve into a puddle of feminist despair, I ask, my tone neutral and a little
upbeat, “Can’t boys be princesses if they want to?”

To which she answers, “Yes,” sometimes and “No,” at other times.

The nine-year-old got into it with her last night. Quoting preschooler: “Boys can’t
have long hair. Long hair is for girls.” He pointed to his own hair, longest in
his class of boys and girls, all the way down his back and reminded her he has
long hair and he’s a boy. Although she has hair all the way down her back,
too, she didn’t exactly have a comeback.

***

As the boy’s hair would indicate, we’ve worked to question gender stereotypes in our
household. I knew this was the case when the girl—our fourth child—arrived and
required no doll purchases; we had plenty of baby dolls already.

Even though questioning gender stereotypes was the plan, having a firstborn boy who loved dresses, fairies, ballet and Alice in Wonderland made it pretty easy. He never
picked up a toy vehicle of his own accord. And like the dolls, we did have some
wheeled toys at the ready.

I was surprised that we were much more lonely in this aspect of our childrearing than
I’d imagined in our hip town (once dubbed “Lesbianville” by the national press).
I was surprised at how many times over the past sixteen-plus years the excuse
for __ behavior has been either “boys…” or girls…”

Sure, with our truck-loving boys, we amassed a fleet of wheeled toys. It’s hard not to
cater to passion, after all (we have, I discovered this summer during a major cleaning out of the games’ shelf, about ten Wizard of Oz-themed games and puzzles, too, from the first boy’s devoted obsession in his earlier years). And double sure, it’s really hard (for me) not to spend my disposable income on cute-yet-practical dresses for my little gal (I don’t most of the time, for the record, I just get tempted).

In Teaching Tolerance, there was an article this week by a kindergarten teacher whose student was drawing a book of pirates, all, according to the artist, male. Then: “Boys are not the only pirates.” On this page, there was a drawing of a girl and a boy pirate. He then explained to me, It’s really true. Girls really could be pirates.”

As the teacher muses, young kids are trying to figure out gender roles. This boy, he points out, is being raised in a family that “brings up non-traditional gender roles and breaks down conventional gender stereotypes.”

Well, kudos to us, then—and I think I’m going to keep questioning gender stereotypes, not
solely with my kids, but also with my peers, who are raising my kids’ friends.

I’m curious, always, about other people’s experiences with gender and the playground set. Do tell!

I always thought of myself as a hot shit, work hard, play hard, a little edgy.  A good friend, but don’t get on my bad side.  You know the type.  But then somehow, something changed.  I changed. I started to feel, not so gutsy, disgusted I guess.  I was tired of working so hard and I didn’t feel like playing at all.

It wasn’t just one thing; it was everything.  The three kids, four counting the husband, were driving me up the wall.  The job was the pits.  I wanted to just dump it all and start over, but I was forty, and that felt too old, at the time.

It was living in that second floor apartment that started it off.  A four-room apartment is just too damn small for five people.  All the kids in one bedroom, bumping and grinding into puberty, one screaming at the other two to get out, every time they had to change a tee-shirt, which was often.  That’s my clearest memory of the kids at that age, screaming at one another, wading through a pile of dirty t-shirts.  It’s no wonder.  My kids learned to holler from the best of them.  They thought “Pick up this pig sty,” yelled loud enough to be heard above the heavy metal playing on the stereo, was every mother’s standard greeting when she came home from work.

My husband and I weren’t doing so hot either.  He liked me better before I
was pissed off all the time.  He wasn’t in love with the new me.  I wasn’t in
love with the old him.  Suppertime was the worst.  His idea of helping out with
meals was adjusting the TV set before we ate.

“Annie, quit slamming those plates around.  I can’t hear the news.”

I slammed my way through Sports and Weather, then banged through Star Trek reruns while the rest of the family ate desert.

Neither of us would leave the kids.  He wouldn’t leave the marriage bed.  I slept on the couch.  The couch, which had been peed on numerous times, by my kids, other people’s kids, and a Chihuahua, didn’t elevate my state of mind.

The shrinking apartment, losing sleep, worrying about work: that’s what started it.  I work in a paper factory.  Management was putting in a new wage earning system.  Under this new Incentive Production Program our work gets reviewed every few months and our hourly rate goes up or down accordingly.  Some smart company man thought this one up.  We used to have piece- work.  You bind ten score of loose-leaf notebooks; you make $1.09. You get it the next week.  Now we wait twelve weeks.  What kind of crap is
that and how come the union let it go by?

I pondered these heavy questions and tossed and turned on a couch that wasn’t only uncomfortable, it was just where you’d expect a couch to be – in the living room, with the TV and the stereo, and the kids, and the husband, and me waiting for the last person to go to bed every night.

So you see, there were reasons for my condition, my “break with reality,” as Jerry calls it.  Jerry’s my therapist.  He says, I “escaped the pressures of Motherhood, adult relationships, and the burdens of my socioeconomic status by retreating to an alternative reality.”

The fact is I was freaking out over a two-story house across the street from my best friend Pearline’s house. At the time it felt more like the house was taking an unusual interest in me, but of course, that kind of thinking was part of my problem.

This guy Jerry is the Employee Assistance Programs Counselor at the shop where I work.  He still thinks I’m nuts, better, but not quite on line yet.  He doesn’t say it like that.  It sounds more treatable when he says it.  I have an official diagnosis: Adult Adjustment Reaction. You have to have an official diagnosis so that the insurance will pay.  I have failed to adjust to adult life.

They’ve got guys like Jerry in lots of the big shops now.  They’re suppose to keep people glued together, functioning at maximum capacity.  If you mess up on your job because of your problem, the shop’s more lenient if you’re seeing a Jerry.

My friend Pearline suggested counseling.  Her cousin Leo works with me.  “You know yourself Leo hasn’t missed a day’s work since this Jerry guy helped him get off the booze.  Maybe he can help you too.”

I didn’t think it was such a hot idea.  I didn’t want people at work to find out that all my ducks weren’t in a row, but I was screwing up.  I never missed work, but I was a bitch when I got there.  I needed my job.

One July day I punched out for lunch and dragged myself up to Jerry’s third floor, air-conditioned office.  He wasn’t there, but I filled out the yellow form hanging on the door.  I peeked through the mail slot to see if anyone standing outside, where I was standing,
could see inside.  No sweat, dark as hell in the Employee Assistance Programs Coordinator’s office, so I slipped the envelope into the slot.

I got an appointment notice the next week.  Jerry got down to practical matters right away.  I could spill my guts on company time up to one hour a week, an additional hour on my time, his schedule permitting.  He gave me a three page list of community resources: the Yellow Pages of human suffering.  Phone numbers for the Mental Health Center, Detox, Battered Woman’s Shelter.  The same list that’s tacked near the time clock.  He also
said, “Nothing we discuss will ever be used for disciplinary action at work.”

After his spiel, Jerry asked me why I’d come.  The first time I just told him
I was jittery, confused.  He wanted to talk about my husband and my kids, boring stuff.  I wanted to talk about the house across the street form Pearline’s house.  My sweet
house.  My big strong sturdy house with the pretty smooth slats and the smiley windows.

Like I told Jerry, it was the house itself, the physical structure that caught my eye.  What can I say?  She was beautiful.

My thing with the house started in late spring.  Pearline and I had kids on the same baseball team.  Pearline didn’t have a job.  She had her kids, her husband, her house, the yard, and the dog. Her husband made pretty good money. Their house is on the same street as the ball field, Bridgeman Lane Memorial Park.  Two nights a week I’d pick her and her kids up for baseball.  I would get out of work at four-thirty, run home to make sure uniforms were clean and everyone was fed, then off to Pearline’s.  The kids usually ran over to the baseball field as soon as we got there.  Pearline was always late.  She has a thing about not leaving the house until the dishes are done.  I didn’t want to help her with the dishes, and it depressed me to watch her, knowing that mine were home in the sink with the mashed potatoes turning into cement on the plates.  So I’d sit outside on her steps,
glad to be alone for a while, staring across the street.

I admitted to Jerry up front, a certain bent toward daydreaming.  But hey, I still say that this house was encouraging me.  That first spring evening I wasn’t even interested in that house or any house. Then, softly, so you had to pay attention just to hear it, flute music
came floating out of the second story window, pretty and kind of sad.

Jerry says I was entering the realm of magical thinking, grasping for symbolic markers, some sign for my mind to play with.  The house looked perfectly normal.  Common, built like a box, put up cheap, after the war, like most of the houses on Bridgeman Lane, and exactly like my friend Pearline’s.  A front door in the middle, a picture window on one side, a smaller window on the other side, with windows above each of these.  Painted
off-white, the house looked just like the ones I had drawn in grammar school.  Well, it didn’t have a picket fence, but it had a sidewalk leading up to the front door.

It was a few weeks later when I realized that something really strange was going on with the house.  I was sitting on Pearline’s bottom step again.  I could see that the grass across
the street needed to be cut.  I was thinking maybe my oldest son could make a few bucks cutting the lawn when I noticed the trim around the picture window was getting kind of shabby.  I tried to figure how much the kids would get for scraping the trim on seventeen windows and two doors.  I had never seen the back of the house, but I included four back windows and a back door in my count.  I looked at the picture window and thought it
would be tedious because it had some fancy trim work that I hadn’t noticed before.  Beautiful work, intricate.  I thought I might not mind painting it myself.  I got up and looked at Pearline’s picture window.  It didn’t have any special trim.  I could have
sworn the front windows of the houses were identical.

“Ever notice the lattice work on the picture window across the street?”  I asked Pearline when she finally came out.

“What lattice work?”

“On the picture window.  Was it always there?”

“There’s no lattice work on the picture window.  We almost bought that house,” she said, trying to manage a jug of Kool-Aid, a bat and two lawn chairs. “Take something will you?”

“Sure, gimme the lawn chairs.  Look at the window,Pearl.”

“Oh yeah, when they put that on?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Well, I didn’t notice it Wednesday.”

“Probably been like that for years.  So who cares anyway?”

I cared.  Now that I was really comparing the houses I noticed that the picture window on ten Bridgeman Lane was bigger then Pearline’s too.

“Who lives across the street?” I asked the next Saturday morning.

“Two women.  Marlina, nice lady, and Tina, kind of strange.”

‘Well the two women have four front steps now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Used to be three.”

“Oh please.  Are you fighting with Charlie again?”

“Again?  You mean still? ”  Charlie’s my ex-husband.  In those days we did nothing but fight.

Pearline sat down next to me.  She put her arm around me and gave me a sideways hug.  “Really, everything O.K?”  Pearline’s got good hugs.  “Come on, spill it.”

Since she gave me an opening and
kept right on hugging me, I bitched some about Charlie and the kids, then I
went on a long tirade about the new Incentive Production Rates.  Pearline had already heard all of this stuff,
but she let me rant and rave.  I was
trying to point out that my paycheck has taken a turn for the worse, now that I
have Incentive.  Well I guess I got
pretty loud and flung out some words that Pearline found “positively
vulgar.”  This is the point when she
started talking very slowly and patiently, leading up to the part where I
should go see Jerry the shrink.  “Annie,
I think you need help.  Professional
help.”  I paid attention to her, partly
because I was scared and partly because she started rubbing my shoulders.

Pearline and I didn’t talk much about
the house across the street for the next few weeks.  The discussions made her nervous.  After I hooked up with Jerry, I kept watching
the house, against his advice.  I tried
not to, but the damn thing kept getting more beautiful.  And it was growing.  Slowly, very slowly, just an inch a week,
maybe, but faster than the old oak tree on the east side whose lowest branch
held a birdhouse.  The birdhouse was
directly across from the second story window at the beginning of baseball
season.  Now it was a good six inches
below.  I started watching for traces of
construction, a pile of brick or a backhoe discretely hidden in the backyard
bushes.  I found no evidence.  Maybe they worked at night.  Maybe I was insane.

I decided to take a picture of the
house.  I took three, actually.

Pearline
groaned, “Annie the house fetish.  You’ll
never get well.”  None of the pictures
came out, although I got some great shots of the kids in their uniforms from
the same roll.

By late August baseball season was
over.  I still saw Jerry, and Pearline,
and the house a couple times a week.  I
had almost convinced myself that I had made up the whole business.  No more fantasizing.  I needed more rest was all.  I had my back to the house when Pearline got
me started again.  She was telling me
about a new diet.  Pearline and Jerry
both think that diet and exercise will help my emotional health.

“Oh shit,” she said.

“What?” I asked, listening for a
screaming kid.

“Look at your house.”  Pearline leaned forward in her lawn
chair.  She was facing me, staring across
the street.

I stood up and turned around.  The picture window.  Why hadn’t I measured it?  Why hadn’t I measured the whole damn house?  The picture window was now a bay window,
bulging right out of the house with two smaller windows attached on either
side.

“So they had a bay window put on the
house, huh?” I said, trying to hide my triumph.
I was about to prove that this house was jerking me around or have
Pearline for company in la la land.

“Why don’t we just ask them?”

“O.K.,” I said, ready to march right
across the street with my best friend and do just that.

“I was thinking maybe you could do
it.”  Pearline had the nerve to look me
in the eye when she said this.

I wanted to strangle her.  “Sure, why not?  Everybody already knows I’m nuts.”

We argued on and off for the rest of
the day about how crazy it would seem to the people across the street if one or
both of us asked a few neighborly questions about the growth of their
property.  We decided a covert operation
was the best course of action.  I stayed
late at Pearline’s that night.  Her
husband had front row seats for some motivational speaker.  We waited until her kids were in bed, hoping
everyone within snooping range was asleep.
We flipped a coin to see who would measure the house.  I lost.

I crouched low, peeking through the
bay window.  Midnight and there was still
a light on in the kitchen.  I could make
out two women sitting at a large kitchen table.
That table would never fit in Pearline’s kitchen.  I could hear talking, but couldn’t make out
the words above my own heavy breathing.
Shit.  Midnight.  They should have been sleeping.

I decided to get the job done
anyway.  What the hell.  What’s the difference between a jail cell and
a room in county hospital?  How much
trouble can you get into for attempted house measuring?  A full moon gave me light to work by.  I put myself into my work ass-backwards, my
butt leading the way as I bent from the waist, taking a few steps backward at a
time, trying to make the tape measure behave.
I wanted an accurate measure, but the tape was hooked to the house only
by the little tab thing at the end.
Pulling too hard would dislodge it.
I worked slowly and secured it with a rock every few feet.  I inched my way, until one step brought my
rear end in contact with – something.  My
heart froze.  My breathing stopped.  I stared between my legs.  There stood the largest human being I had
ever seen.  The woman carried a weapon, a
long thin knife of some kind, a skewer maybe.
An Amazon was about to skewer me.
That wimp Pearline was supposed to be watching from across the street.  Why wasn’t she trying to rescue me?  I fell to my knees sputtering, “I…I…”

The Amazon offered me her right hand
and pulled me to my feet. “Come on.  Get
up.”  The weapon dangled in her left
hand.

She stared me up and down and played
with the skewer, turning it from end to end, then holding it between two
fingers like a baton.  “What are you doing
here?”

“That’s a knitting needle,” I said,
realizing too late that this would not be the revelation for her that it was
for me.

“You drunk?” she asked. “What’s
these rocks for?”  She picked up a rock
and snatched the tape measure from my hand.
She seemed normal enough.  But
than, who was I to judge?

“No, I’m…I was just here to… I
was measuring your house.”

“Marlina, come out here,” she
yelled.

A light snapped on.  “Where are you?”

“By the bay window.”

“Are you alone?  I’m not presentable.”

“Get out here…Please.”

Marlina poked her head out the
door.  She was smiling.  Marlina is usually smiling.  “I make it a practice never to leave the
house with my midriff bulge exposed.”
She tightened the straps of her halter-top and extended her hand to
me.  “Hello.”

I stared at her midriff.

“Introduce me to your friend, Tina.”

Tina was actually medium height,
hefty, about my size.  She rolled her
eyes toward me, “Noise that we thought was a dog peeing on our shrubs,”
then shot a look at her house mate, “I’d like you to meet Marlina.”

Marlina shook my hand.

Tina said, “Cut the shit.  It’s midnight.  Why are you snooping around?”

“I thought, it seemed, your
house….”

“Here, sit.”  Marlina took me by the elbow and guided me to
the steps.  “Don’t be afraid of us.”

“Be afraid,” Tina said.

I went with the truth.  It was all I had.  “I thought your house was growing,” I
squeaked out.  I readied myself to put up
a fight if Tina made a move toward me.

“Plain old garden variety nut.”  Tina walked back into the house.  “If you can’t get rid of her, yell.”

Marlina drew the story out of
me.  It was easy after Tina left.  Marlina said Tina had a special problem
herself.  Tina gets upset when she’s in
tight places.  A few months before, she
had gotten so upset when her boss backed her in a corner that she decked him,
right there in the accounting office.
The company agreed not to press charges if Tina took an extended
vacation.  Tina sees a full-fledged
psychiatrist.  She has to pay for it
herself.  I’m dying to know her official
diagnosis.  Jerry says, “Don’t
push.”  He never met Tina, but he thinks
she has trust issues.

Marlina sat with me a long
time.  We talked about other stuff
besides being nuts.  She told me that she
and Tina had lived together, right in this house, for over ten years.  They had made some changes in the house,
especially since Tina was out of work.
Tina is real handy, but not good enough to put in a bay window
overnight.  I tried to get Marlina to
tell me exactly when the window was put in.
“Recently,” was as specific as she got.

I smiled and nodded at Marlina.  She was being so nice to me.  I felt less crazy then I had in months, or
anyway, I cared less.  She gave me some
grape juice, then sent me home, saying, “Come back and measure away in daylight
if you like.”

When I returned to Pearline she was
a basket case.  She had been peeking out
from behind her curtains with her hand on the phone ready to call the cops for
an hour.  She sucked up the part about
Tina doing some work on the house.  “Of
course.  How could I ever have gotten
drawn into this thing?”

I stopped talking to Pearline about
the house altogether for a few months.
We kind of cooled off towards each other.  She was jealous that I was starting to hang
around with her neighbors.  Jerry wasn’t
so sure that it was healthy either.  But
who can argue with success?  He could see
that I was getting calmer by the week.
There were times when I wanted him to help me figure out how to tell my
daughter that her new boyfriend was a useless punk without pushing her further
into his hairy tattooed arms, that Jerry seemed more interested in the house,
and Marlina and Tina.  I bet he had
closet fantasies about being Tina’s counselor.

Then I started having this
reoccurring dream.  I dreamed that there
was a secret room in the house, up in the attic.  A small room, lots of light, an overstuffed
chair with big pink flowers on it.  I
told the dream to Tina.  She was
smoothing an oak board by hand at the time.
She handed me a piece of sandpaper, “Like this,” she said, and made even
circular movements with her hand over mine.
“You do it.”

When I first asked Tina to show me
carpentry, she said no.  She couldn’t
stand having somebody follow her around.
Now she was showing me woodworking stuff once in awhile.  I’m hoping to get her to help me build a
doghouse for Pearline’s carpet destroying mutt, to sort of help bring my
friends together.

“So what’s the room for?”  She didn’t really seem interested, but Tina
doesn’t make chit chat, so I told her.

“For me.  It’s waiting for me.  It’s my room.”

“Christ, the only waiting room
you’re ever going to see is in the shrink’s office.”  Tina smiled.
She actually grinned at me.  Then
she was Tina again, working with no unnecessary conversation.

For the next few weeks Marlina
wouldn’t let me past the kitchen.  Tina
was working on the stairwells and wanted to be left alone.  Marlina and I were spending a lot of time
together, shopping for winter clothes for my kids.  Marlina’s into kids.  She’s even more into clothes.  She likes all of that horrible miss-matched
punky stuff.  The kids love to shop with
her.

One Tuesday after work I brought
over cranberry nut bread, Tina’s favorite.
She ate two pieces with us in the kitchen.  She was acting funny, friendly almost.  She smiled at me again.  Then something really weird happened.

“How’s your finances?” she asked.

“Tina!”  Marlina was mortified.  “How rude.”
Marlina’s a funny mix, loose about some things, but she’s a tight ass
when it comes to money.

Tina shrugged.  “What?
I just want to find out if she can pay her way.”

Marlina stood and looked sternly
into Tina’s eyes.  Her voice had an
edge.  It was the first time I saw
Marlina pissed.  “Tina, we agreed.  We won’t ask for any money unless she can
afford it.”

“How you plan on finding out if you
don’t ask?”  Tina laughed, leaned back
and folded her arms over her broad chest.
“O.K.  Do it your way.”

Marlina gained her composure.  She threw her head back, looked like a mare,
I thought she might whinny, but she turned to me and straightened up,
dignified, like the Pope had just walked in.
She said  “Annie, Tina has a
surprise for you.”

“Room’s done,” said Tina.  Just like that.  Like I was suppose to know what the hell they
were talking about.  I just stared at
them.  Marlina had to take me by the hand
and walk me up to the attic before I caught on.
Tina didn’t even go up with us.
We walked up a narrow staircase, Marlina swung open the door and there
it was, the last of the afternoon sun streaming through the south window, pouring
over the slats on the new wooden floor, white sheet rock walls waiting to be
painted.  My room.

That was a few months ago.  Life’s better, but it’s not easy.  I don’t think it’s ever going to be
easy.  My daughter’s pregnant with the punk’s
baby.  They’re getting married as soon as
he makes it through his fifth year of high school.

Jerry thinks my room at Tina’s and
Marlina’s is a bad idea.  He says,
“having a space outside your primary home causes confusion and creates a
pseudo-reality where don’t have to face your situation head on.”  He thinks “One should face the problems of
the modern adult world, work through the emotional milieu, and accept that
changing roles may cause ambiguous feelings, conflicting with the value systems
of our cultural and socioeconomic background.”
But, like I said, Jerry talks about the room and the house more than I
do now.  He’s earned his money.  I’ve been making incentive for months.  We were working on terminating, but I had an
unfortunate set back.

I got into a big fight at Union
Hall.  I was merely trying to point out
that with Incentive Production if your rate is high, the company gets a
two-month free ride.  To make matters
worse if your production rate gets too
high they up the base rate, but no matter how low production rates get the base
rate never gets lowered.  What really
bothers me is that the rank and file voted this mess in, afraid the company
would pack up and move someplace where people had more incentive.  I used the F word.  I was out of control.  I don’t want my kids using that word and there
I was in a public place screaming it.

The incident got management pretty
upset.  They sent out a memo: “Although a
certain few employees are resistant to change, the Incentive Production Rate
Program is a great success, a more manageable system, whereby all parties
benefit, through which, we as a team, can reach top efficiency and production.”

I figure it’s not a good time to
stop seeing Jerry.  We’re dealing with
working out anger in constructive ways.

Tina thinks I should can Jerry and
run for Union Steward.

My husband, Charlie is threatening
to charge me with abandonment if I don’t stop leaving the apartment for my room
every night.

Marlina’s worried I’m going to burn myself out running between both houses.

Pearline thinks I should file for divorce before Charlie does.

I think I should go to my job, cook for my husband and my kids, drive to my room to sit and rock and contemplate future adjustments.

And leave a comment on my blog for a chance to win a copy of The Girls Club.

Sarah is a writer, an activist, and the mother of a nine-year-old gender-nonconforming boy and a six-year-old super-duper gender-conforming girl. She feels passionately that kids–and grownups!–should be able to be who they are without fear.

Celebrate the Launch of Operation Marriage! Book Review & Giveaway

by shoffman

http://asiam.fm/node/410

And here is a random picture of what beach beauties are reading in P’Town

DAD

Dead Man’s Float

Dad is playing dead and I’m not in the mood for it.  He’s sprawled out on the Lazy Boy as usual.  He lies with his head dangling to one side and his mouth open.  His color
is not too good to begin with so it’s pretty convincing.  I’m on the couch knitting and watching Oprah.  “Cut it out, Dad.”  I poke his shin with the tip of my sneaker, not hard, but disrespectfully.  Hey, he’s playing dead and he’s already been asked politely to knock it off twice.

Fortunately for my goal of knitting a few uninterrupted rows the slightest grin crosses his lips.  Otherwise I would have to get off the couch and check for pulse and breath.  This is one of his better performances.  His chest barely rises and, since I’m not responding to death, every once in a while he throws in a little twitch to demonstrate that he could be in the throws of something significant, but short of dead, like a heart attack or a stroke maybe.  He’s had several of each.

“You’re not funny. How are you going to like it if you actually do kick the bucket and
everyone just keeps knitting or reading the paper?”  Actually, if I was in a better mood, I would think his stunt funny.

Sometimes I play dead myself.  It’s a good way to fall asleep.  It’s a family tradition that started on Haviland Pond where Dad taught us to swim. The dead man’s float was lesson one.  Are all kids taught the simple joy of lying in the water on their bellies, faces submerged, that other world gone for a minute, two minutes, then to let the air out the side of their mouths slowly and stretch it to three minutes, with practice close to four?  Four minutes to straddle here and there.  The object of the game to fool a near-by swimmer, preferably a sibling, into thinking we were gone for good, then to spring out of the water at the last possible second screaming and gasping for air.  What could be funnier?  Unless it was the thrill of being on the receiving end of the game, “finding” your
sibling dead in the water, wading over to the corpse, touching the wet shoulder,
that luscious horror of that short window of time when you’ve convinced yourself
that maybe, just maybe, she was dead, and congratulated yourself for facing the
dead body with such courage.

My sister Kathy stops by on her way to choir practice.  She comes into the house without
knocking.  “Hi, Dad.”  She kisses the top of his head.

“He’s dead,” I say.

“That’s too bad,” she says.  “I brought blueberry pie.”  She takes off her coat and puts a pastry box on an end table next to Dad.  This makes his eyelids flicker and his mouth
twitch.  She straightens his head and gives me a dirty look.  “He’s going to get a
crick in his neck.”

“He’s dead,” I say.  “And you’re weird.”

“She’s knitting a scarf for a dead man,” she whispers in his ear.  “And she calls me weird.”

His eyes pop open.  “Boo,” he says loud while her face is still an inch away.

“Dad,” she squeals, making his day.

His eyes dart to the pastry box.  “Is it made with that crap?”  He means Splenda, the sugar substitute.

“No,” she says.

“Liar,” I say.  I’ve been sitting with a dead man all afternoon and my sister steals the “boo.”

Sally Bellerose. “Dead Man’s Float,” Boston Literary Magazine, winter 2006 www.Bostonliterary@aol.com.

Sally Bellerose. “Dead Man’s Float,” Sniplits, summer 2008. www.sniplis.com.

DeeDee and I stand in the four-foot wide meridian of weeds that separates the county hospital’s parking lot from the parking lot of the factory where our mothers work.  We shield our eyes and squint across the blacktop.

“Looking for your man?”  DeeDee smirks.

“Shut up.  It’s hot.”  I’d smirk back, but she’s way better at it than I am.  “We should have made extra lemonade.”

“It’s hard enough to haul what we’ve got.” She squeezes her bare biceps. ”I’m starting to get man-arms.  Good thing we’re back in school next week.”

There’s a bench behind us with all but two of the wooden slats ripped out.  Our jug and cooler balance on the slats.  The bench is our service counter.  We are boloney sandwich vendors.  We used to have a better spot, close to factory, where our customers didn’t have to walk through parked cars to get to us, but we got booted out by one of the factory’s foreman.

“Mr. Harold Jones.”  DeeDee flattens her
hand on my collarbone, right below my throat, where she thinks my heart is.  She wants to be a nurse but the only body parts she’s got a grasp on are legs, tits, and ass.  DeeDee is my best friend by default.  There are two other girls our age on our block and they’re each other’s best friends. In a couple of weeks, in high school, when I’m not a boloney vendor
anymore, maybe I’ll meet new friends.  If I don’t, DeeDee will.

“Get your stinky lunchmeat hand off me.” I grimace.  “He’s old enough to be my father.”

The sun is straight up in the sky.  The lunch bell shrills and the workers file slowly out of the big brick factory.  You’d think they’d rush out.  But they march out in perfect order, a row of ants heading toward a crumb on the linoleum. Hundreds of them and only one time clock to punch.  Hot and sweaty, and hungry enough, if they’ve forgotten their lunch or are ready to break the diet they started at breakfast, to pay seventy-five cents for boloney and cheese on white bread.

Mom and Aunt Delia trudge out at the front of the line as usual.  It’s a relief to DeeDee and me that our mothers never come to our bench at lunchtime. They head for the big metal picnic tables that sit on slabs of concrete right near the factory.  They face us from afar, without embarrassing us by waving.

Aunt Delia whips off her hairnet, makes a production of shaking her hair free, then
hoists a leg onto the bench of the picnic table.  Laughing, she examines a run in her stocking, advertising her best feature.

“God, why doesn’t she just spread her legs?” DeeDee groans in disgust. “Shoot me if I ever act like that.”

“Bang.”  I point a finger.  “You’re dead.”

If Aunt Delia is a bear trap, my mother, with her head hung forward, is day-old bait on
a fishing line.  “Sit up.” I hiss.  “Why does my mother hunch over like that?”  I pull my
shoulders back.

“She should take off the hairnet.  Shit, she could get a man with her hair alone if she’d loosen up.  I’ve got it.”  She snaps her fingers.  “Make her read Gone with the Wind.”

I watch my Aunt Delia run her hands up her other leg.

“Forget Gone with the Wind.”  DeeDee erases the air.  “Scarlet O’Hara didn’t do such good
job managing her men, did she?”

I look straight ahead and think about our mother’s bad job of managing men.  My father, who I know is an extremely good looking man from the picture tucked under my mother’s mattress, was married to someone other than my mother.  My mother, who hides a nice figure under a baggy sweater no matter how hot the day, had sex with a married man?  DeeDee’s father did marry Aunt Delia.  DeeDee got a Christmas card from him one year.

She cups her hands and whispers in my ear, “Mr. Jones is married.”

I take a couple side steps to get away.  “Old and married.”  I cross my arms over my chest.  “So shut up.”

“Old and married, and?”  She widens her eyes.  When I ignore her she knocks the top of my head with her knuckles.  “Anybody home?  He’s black.  So shut up yourself, Miss Holier Than Thou.” I turn away from DeeDee, our mothers, and the factory.  Like I don’t know Mr. Jones is black.  No way DeeDee’s actually read Gone with the Wind.  She saw the movie.  Slaves and hoop skirts.  I look at the Franklin County Hospital while I strap on
my change apron.  I love the feel of the apron against my thighs, especially when it’s full of quarters.  I love the sound of dollar bills scratching against each other in the pocket when I move.  Most of all I love the way my mother hugs the bags of groceries we buy with the money that comes out of the apron’s pockets when we carry them up the stairs.

A woman dressed in white comes out of the glass door below the neon Emergency sign of
the hospital.  She moves briskly, with purpose.  Her hips sway, just a whisper, none of Aunt Delia’s screaming movement. She won’t come over to buy a sandwich, the nurses rarely do.  Maybe they think we’re not hygienic.  A doctor once bought three cups of lemonade, but he hasn’t come back.  The nurse gets in her Camaro.  It’s shiny and red.  There are a lot of new cars parked on the hospital side of the parking lot.

“Heads up,” DeeDee says.  Four women, hairnets in place, make their way through the grid of parked cars.  You can’t be sure if they’re coming to buy or pile into a car.  “Crystal Gayle wouldn’t wear a hair net.”  DeeDee starts to hum “Don’t it make my Brown Eyes Blue?”  She sticks the “Sandwich” flag she made in home ec into the dirt. I fold a checkered oilcloth over the bench slats and line up cups and sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper.

When we first set out to make our fortunes selling sandwiches, it was DeeDee’s idea to
sing.  She said people would give us tips for singing.  They don’t.  We sing anyway.  DeeDee starts out soft, just purring the melody, like always.  Within a few seconds, I join her.  Since we were toddlers our mothers have told us we have beautiful voices. It doesn’t occur to us that other people might not agree.  After a couple of stanzas we put words to the music.  When the hairnet ladies are fifty feet from us, and clearly on their way over to us, we stop singing.

“Hello.” DeeDee smiles as if handing them sandwiches is her biggest thrill.

Tony G. sprints across the lot, putting on the brakes when he’s two feet from DeeDee.  Young and flirty, he grins at her.  “Three.”  He sticks his puppy dog paw and three dollar
bills in front of me without breaking eye contact with DeeDee.  I snatch the money.

“Mustard?”  DeeDee turns the name of a condiment you put on boloney into a dirty word.  He says, “No thanks,” to the tiny packets she nabbed from the corner diner.  I hand him his seventy-five cents worth of change.  He peels his eyes away from her to turn and shout, “Hey, Mr. Jones, we on for basketball tonight?”

Mr. Harold Jones and his wife are part of the small group trickling toward us.  He does not shout back to Tony G.  Mr. Jones smiles and waits until he’s close enough to answer in a normal speaking volume, “Looking forward to it.”  He seems amused.  He often seems amused.  I brace myself for when the machine oil and old spice scent of him hits me.  I don’t want to make a fool of myself like my cousin just did.  I separate the change from the dollar bills in my apron slowly.

I look up and there he is standing right in front of me.

“Hello, Mr. Jones.  Would you like a sandwich?”  My delivery is perfect.  I smile, friendly, but not school-girl silly.  I do not forget to add, “A sandwich, Mrs. Jones?” This bit is crucial.  Mrs. Harold Jones is at his side, with her maroon lipstick and Diana Ross flip.  I give her the identical smile I gave Mr. Jones.

Mrs. Jones steps off the meridian to help an elderly black woman, who is wearing the blue
stripes of a cleaning lady, into her car. I like Mrs. Jones’ style even though she doesn’t give me the time of day.  DeeDee calls her The Fat Jones.  Mrs. Jones holds the car door for
the old woman like it’s the most important job in the world.  Mrs. Jones holds herself more like a trim nurse than a fat factory worker.  She slams the door shut and her body ripples.
She straightens up,  Her head is high, like the world should ripple right along with her.  She steps back onto the meridian.  Her breasts bounce a couple times before coming to rest.  “I should have thought to help.”  Mr. Jones smiles at her appreciatively.

He’s is the only man I know who acts like this in public, like he’s in love with his
wife.  This is why, in my fantasies, Mrs. Jones has got to go.  Her death is quick
and I’m the first on the scene to help Mr. Harold Jones through his loss.

“Baby,” Mr. Jones says to his wife. “You want a sandwich today?”

She hooks her arm through his.  “I got a taste for beans and rice.  Let’s try the
diner.”

“Alright.”  He drags the word out like a caress.  He nods at DeeDee, then me.  “You ladies sound like Nina Simone.”  He often tells us we sound like Nina Simone.  “You have a
pleasant afternoon, now.”  He smiles, a big, split the world open smile.

I fold my hands against my apron to stop the shake. If I speak it won’t come out right.

“Thank you, Mr. Jones.  You have a pleasant afternoon, too.”  DeeDee gives them a prom
queen smile and pours a cup of lemonade for a tall man carrying a lunch pail.  I’m still mute and motionless.  She nudges my ankle with the toe of her pink sneaker.  “This man needs fifty-cents change?”

“Thank you, Mr. Jones.  Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” I say, after the time for saying it has passed.

Mrs. Jones turns her head to look at me and leans a bit closer into Mr. Jones.  He shakes his head and smiles that funny smile he has, like there’s nothing he can do about this funny world but smile.

“Got cravings.”  DeeDee’s says as they drive off in their green Chevy.

“I do not.”  I snap.

“Yes, you do.”  DeeDee shimmies her shoulders in delight.  “But I meant The Fat Jones.”

I get busy restacking cups that don’t need restacking so my head is down and DeeDee can’t
read my expression.

DeeDee says, “You need flirting lessons.”

“From you?”

DeeDee smoothes her hands over her skirt.”  I got a date with Tony G.  You got a date with
Mr. Jones?”

“Shut up.  I’m not flirting with him.  Quit touching your ass.  It’s unseemly.  Tony G’s a jerk.”

“Unseemly?”  She tries out the word again.  “Unseemly.”  She nods in approval.  “That’s a good word.”

I remember why, besides the fact that she’s my cousin, we live in the same tenement, and
she’s the only girl available, I hang around with DeeDee.  How many people are so easy going that they can appreciate a word used to criticize them?

After forty-five minutes the factory whistle shrieks again and our potential
customers march back in.  “Six customers.  This is the worse day we’ve
ever had.”  DeeDee starts singing “Fever.” as we pack up.  I join in.

In the late afternoon, when the second half of our mothers’ shift is over, I come back to
the parking lot without DeeDee.  I perch on the arm of the sandwich bench and wait.
The whistle blows.  The workers file out and swarm the lot.  I look for Mr. Harold Jones and his green Chevy.  My mother and Aunt Delia come out together and stop to talk.  Car doors open and slam shut.  The green Chevy is nowhere in sight.

“Isn’t that your little Nina?”  I hear Mrs. Jones’ voice behind me.

“Hello.”  Mr. Jones greets me with a nod.

“Still selling sandwiches?”  Mrs. Jones asks.

I shake my head, disoriented because they turned up behind me, but determined to speak
this time. “You parked in the hospital lot?”  Did they take the afternoon off?  Is one of them sick?

“Yes.”  Mrs. Jones raises her eyebrows.

My face burns.  “It’s just, I didn’t see you come out.”

“You’re waiting on us coming out?”  She cocks her head, like she can’t quite decide what, exactly, is wrong with me.

“I’m not.”  I fumble over the two words and have to curl my feet under me and hold tight to the arm of the bench to keep myself from toppling forward. “I’m waiting for my mother.”

“That’s nice,” Mrs. Jones says.  ”To have a child waiting.”  She gives Mr. Jones a glance, over in a split second, so quick any one watching couldn’t be sure it happened.  Anyone who isn’t fourteen and in love.  I don’t know what the look means, but I want to look at him like that.  They walk arm in arm to the green Chevy, which has been parked behind me in the County Hospital lot the whole time I was looking for it.

I hear Mr. Jones say, “Dr. Bello,” before they’re out of earshot.

Doctor Bello? If Mr. Jones is sick I may never know. I start high school next week.

The parking lot clears out.  My mother sees me and waves.  I jump off the bench.

“My goodness.  You haven’t run to me like this since you were in second grade.”
She smiles, takes off the hairnet, and unpins the nest on top of her head.  Her hair tumbles down her back.  Even unbrushed, it’s her crowning glory.  We walk two blocks north and west to stand across the street from the most beautiful building in the city, Saint
Mary’s Roman Catholic Church.

The low afternoon sun makes a halo around the steeple. A crow lands on the tip of the cross. “Prettier than a skyscraper,” she says, referring to Aunt Delia’s and DeeDee’s upcoming trip to New York City.  It’s hard to imagine who would howl louder, DeeDee or Aunt Delia, if they found out about our trips to church.

My mother says she and I and Aunt Delia and DeeDee are Catholic by blood, because my
grandparents were Catholic.  Aunt Delia says you have to go to mass every Sunday to be Catholic: that the blood thing only holds true for Jews.  I’ve never been to mass.

My grandparents died before I was born.  I don’t think I carry their religion in my blood.
But I love the music.  I wish I had told Mr. and Mrs. Jones I was going to Saint Mary’s.  I might have made an impression on them as something better than boloney on white bread. They might think I’m a real Catholic.

My mother takes her eyes off the steeple. “What is it, Rita?  Something
troubling you?”

I don’t have much practice saying troubling things to my mother.  I say, “Let’s go inside.”

We sit in a dark corner in the last pew.  The choir is above us, in a loft, in the back of the church.  The choir bursts out in laughter.  This is unusual.  Someone blows a pitch pipe.  They get back to the serious business of tuning up their voices.

The choir mistress, soloist, and organist, all rolled in to one skinny woman, walks up
the center aisle.  Her head is bowed and covered in black lace.  She goes straight
to the altar and kneels.  There’s no one else in the main body of the church, just her, and me, and my mother.  There will be no priest, no parishioners, no mass, just choir practice.  She looks down at her own folded hands.  What a waste: to be so close to all those statues and stained glass and look at your hands.  She walks back down the aisle.  I stare at her.  It doesn’t matter.  We’re in a shadow and she never looks up.  She clicks up the stairs to the
loft.  Over our heads, chairs shuffle into place.

My mother kneels, but unlike lunchtime on the bench outside the factory, she holds up her
head, listening, looking.  Slanting light streams through the stained glass windows and dances on the back of the pews in front of the church.  She cranes her head to take it in.  Dappled light hits her hair, changing patches from plain brown to shiny chocolate.

The choir mistress strikes a chord. “Attention.”

“They’re going to start,” my mother whispers. The choir voices hone in on each other like a swarm of bees.  They begin to chant.  “Gregorian,” my mother informs me, as she always does when the choir chants. I have no idea how she came to know the name for this pretty buzzing sound.  My mother stretches forward.  Her whole body is taut, angled up, toward the front of the choir loft where the music spills over into the church.  It makes me mad, the way she’s so willing to settle for whatever spills over.

I stand.  “Come on.  Let’s sit farther up.”

She says, “No.”  But takes my hand.

We move to a brightly-lit center pew.  At first we are both nervous in the light, but the music calms us.  I close my eyes and listen, let my thoughts go anywhere they want to.  After a while I open my eyes and the light doesn’t bother me.

I look at the statue of Jesus, his sad eyes, his bloody palms.  On the other side of the altar stands Mary, her eyes calm, resigned.  The statues and I stare at each other.

Now, I can ask my question.  Why is it wrong to love Mr. Harold Jones?  This is my religion: to listen to holy songs and question plaster saints.

Mr. Jones is a married man.  Old enough to be my father?  What if he was younger?  What if he wasn’t married?  He is handsome.  He is tall. His lips are the color of the banister in our apartment building, a dark worn brown, as dark as his skin.  His eyes are anothe brown.  His voice is deep.  I love the way people say his whole name, Mr. Harold Jones, like he’s somebody.  No one I know would say that it’s right for me to love him.  Maybe that’s why I feel sad when he smiles.  He smiled at me and said to Mrs. Jones, “Loretta, doesn’t she sound like Nina Simone?”  Mrs. Jones said, “No.  Pretty voice. But no, not Nina.”  After that, I started to daydream about him kissing my neck.

The choir stops chanting and, out of the blue, the revelation that Doctor Bello is the
baby doctor who came to talk to the eleventh grade about teen pregnancy hits me.  Mrs. Jones must be pregnant.  I shiver. Pregnant Mrs. Jones.  I bet she knows it all – the dreams of her husband’s hand up my blouse, his kisses on my neck and shoulders.  I slump back.  Wait until DeeDee finds out.  I try to wring some meaning out of the fact that the music stops just when I’m having my revelation.

The choir sings, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”

“Saint Francis’ Prayer.”  My mother inhales deeply, as if she can smell the music.
This one is in English.  They don’t sing in English very often. Besides Ave Maria, Saint Francis’ Prayer is her favorite.  She smiles at me.  I give her a plastic smile that she doesn’t
question.  She closes her eyes in rapt attention to the song and I let the tears roll down my face.

I feel like the worm the Evangelist TV preacher says we all are in Gods’ presence.  I feel shame, hot and wet on my face.  And anger. I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand.  I have a tissue.  I could blow my nose, but I don’t want to call my mother back from St. Francis.

The all-knowing plaster eyes of Jesus make me mad. He’s got a leg up; three fathers, Joseph, God, and the Holy Ghost.

DeeDee can date white guys old enough to own cars. Aunt Delia can love losers who tell her she’s pretty.  I can’t love Mr. Jones.

Even if he says nice things to me, grownup things? Says I sing like Nina Simone.
He’s different from anyone I know. Isn’t that why girls are supposed to be attracted to boys in the first place, because they’re so different?  Leo the Loner, who lives in the apartment under us, gets beat up because the guys on the block think he likes other guys. If you marry a cousin, a boy too much like you, you have retarded babies.

I can’t love Mr. Jones because he’s married.
Even if he wasn’t black.  Who
should I love?  The white boys at school
who either or talk stupid don’t talk at all?
One of the teachers?  The black
boys at school, dumb as the white boys.  Mr. Sanchez, the custodian?  Aunt Delia’s men?   The guys from the factory?  Who, in their right mind, wouldn’t love Mr.
Jones instead of them?

I
won’t.  I will not love Mr. Jones.  I look from Jesus, to Mary, to my mother.

My mother’s
mouth is slack.  Her hands open on her
lap.  Her eyes at half-mast.  She is in the daze of St. Francis’ Prayer,
which the choir is singing for the fourth time.
She doesn’t argue with God.  She
doesn’t argue with anyone.  She speaks
softly and averts her eyes.  She never
yells at me to clean my room, doesn’t tell me what to wear or who to hang
around with.  If she thinks inside the
music, I bet her thoughts are adoring, meek.

DeeDee says
I love him because he’s black.  Would I have loved Mr. Harold Jones if he
weren’t black?

“He
is.”  I say, not quite under my
breath.

“Are
you alright?”  My mother touches my
hand.  Her voice is dreamy.

I nod like
I’m supposed to, but I say, “Mr. Jones.”

She nods
back and looks at me for a long time.
Finally, she brings her lips close to my ear so I can hear her voice
over St. Francis’ Prayer.  I feel her
breath on my cheek.  “But Dear, he’s
married.”

“But,
say he wasn’t.  Say he was just too
old.”

“Well?  He is too old.”

“Say
he wasn’t too old and he wasn’t married?”

“He’d
be someone else.”

“He’d
be a black kid my age.”  My
whispered words turn angry.  My mother
must know how it feels to love someone you’re not supposed to.  She should tell me what she knows.  “You loved my father.  He was married.”  We’ve never spoken of this.  The little bit I know about my father I
learned from DeeDee, through Aunt Delia.

My mother
doesn’t blink.  She stares past me.  Like always, she suffers modestly. Something
heats up just under the surface of her skin.
Her cheeks tinge pink. Otherwise her face does not change.  Her flush cheeks are all it takes to make me
want to let her off the hook, give her back to St. Francis.  She closes her eyes and says, “You can’t
wish someone into the person you want him to be.  All the wishing in the world is not enough.  Mr. Jones is married.  If he were a black child your age, it would
be very hard.  People can be very hard,
Rita.”

“Not
people Mom. You.  What would you
think?”

“It
would be hard to see people being mean to you.”  She furrows her brow in concentration.  “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” she
says.  We’ve seen the film twice.  She shakes her head sadly.  “They had money, clothes, big
houses.”

“What
does that have to do with anything?”

“I
don’t know.  It seems to smooth things
out in movies.  We don’t live in the
movies do we?”  She asks this like
it’s an actual question.  She sits up a
little straighter and looks me in the eye when she answers herself.  “No, we live in tenement in westernMassachusetts.”

I want to
crawl onto the lap of this timid woman with the soft voice, my mother.  I rest my head on her shoulder.  Her resignation usually makes me angry, but I
want to burrow into it now.  She squeezes
my shoulder.  “I wish I could put
you in my pocket and keep you safe,” she says.

Safe from
what?  Wearing a hairnet?  Working in a factory?  Racism?
Love?

The choir
stops singing abruptly.

The pitch
pipe sounds.  “Good work this
evening.”  The choir mistress sounds
almost cheerful.  The organ bench scrapes
the floor.  My mother’s arm tightens
around me.  She holds her breath.  I huddle next to her, not wanting to move and
disrupt the flow of her excitement, not wanting to untangle myself from her.  This is it: Ave Maria.  We wait, suspended, for the first
heartbreaking syllable.  And then the
choir mistress answers the blow of the pitch pipe with her own perfect
note.  No need for an organ or other
voices, just one skinny woman, one note.
It comes, like it always does, a shot to the heart.  “Ahhhhhhhh.”  The hearts of the choir mistress, Jesus, my
mother, Mary, filling the church, bleeding on until the last millisecond, when,
if it did not break to the next note my own heart really might.  It seems so real, this passion.  “Vaaaaaay.”  My mother lets go of me to clutch her
chest.  “Maaaaa…” Tears trickle
down her cheek.
“Reeeeeeeeeeeee….
Ahhhhhhh.”

My mother’s
only safe passion.  She is afraid to look
living men in the eye, but she has this.
The music pumps through us, beautiful.
Beautiful and dangerous.
Dangerous because for a moment you might think it’s enough.

“Ave Maria,” The Saint Ann’s Review, edited by Beth Bosworth, Saint Ann’s School, volume 7, number 1, summer 2007