Relo

I have moved my blog to here although I haven't beautified it yet. I suppose adornment will have to wait.

A New Mr. T.

Last night, Patrick and I went to see Sweeney Todd. I had looked forward to it. I love the musical, and I enjoy depictions of gloomy Victorian London. I squeal over Johnny Depp, and I like Helena Bonham Carter even though I take her less seriously than I used to. (I blame a friend of mine who refers to her a GNILF: a Gnome I’d Like to Fuck.)

Tim Burton’s movie is so dark it’s light—it shimmers with malevolence. It seems to achieve this at the expense of the play’s exuberance; the film feels a little wooden sometimes, especially during songs like “A Little Priest.” Part of the musical’s witchcraft stems from the way it gets you to cheer for murder and cannibalism: Here’s Patti LuPone and George Hearn (the original Sweeney) performing “A Little Priest,” for example.

“What is that? It's fop. Finest in the shop. And we have some shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd on top! And I've just begun-- Here's the politician, so oily it's served with a doily, have one!”

Scholars argue that one of the consequences of Romanticism was the startling conclusion that the human imagination, in all of its glorious potency, could create visions much worse than any Lucifer. Burton’s Sweeney Todd strengthens this claim; I like it the way I like a really good nightmare.

It will take some time for me to forget Sweeney’s blood-streaked face as it appears near the end of the film. He is either unaware of the blood or uninterested in wiping it off.

People are a wicked, wicked lot.

Kinder, Gentler

The scene at my home a couple of nights ago:

Glenn Miller and orchestra play classic Christmas songs on the stereo. My husband strings some multicolored lights around the perimeter of our front two windows. Chloe, our golden lab/retriever mix, runs around with a cheerful tongue hanging out of her mouth.

I stand in the kitchen making brownies, which 1) do not have pot in them, and 2) I plan to give to our neighbors. I'm practicing the ancient ritual of never returning a plate to a neighbor without something on it. The plate is decorated with Frosties and snowflakes.

Whose life is this?

(My cat Sybil, however, continues to stare up at me with huge, hostile, and startled eyes. Some things are constant.)

Happy holidays to all of you, and thank you for reading.

Lauren



This is not my home in Old Orchard, Toledo, but it looks like it.
Old Orchard is full of narrow streets, old-fashioned houses, and many trees. And it's across the street from the university.




The Wanamaker (now Lord & Taylor) light show in downtown Philadelphia. I'm feeling sentimental today, apparently.

Acronym game

ENNUI:

Every time I hope to write something

New, I

Notice that I get stuck in an

Unending loop of

Introspection.


Enough is enough, already. I

Need to turn outwards instead of inwards, or at least find a

Novel way to

Unite the two, thereby creating a more

Interchangeable I.


Expression should

Not be so circular,

Nor so insular. Let me look

Under a different rock or use it like a doorjamb to block further self-

Iteration.

Revisiting Prohibition: Rant

I'm sick of feeling like I'm disabled because I'm an alcoholic.

I'm sick of having to vet every situation before I enter it.

I'm sick of seeing that look of either pity or guilt on people's faces when I tell them about "my problem."

I'm sick of thinking about it all the time.

And I'm sick of not doing what I want to do.

(No relapse afoot here. Just needed to vent.)

Paging Doctor Starling

"I thought the killing scenes in the film made it a more enjoyable film to watch."

Swoon!

Snippet from a short story a student asked me to read:

"Every time I look at him, his eyes take me off the face of the earth and to a world unknown."

This one's just high.

"After playing several out of town shows, I met scads of new people. These people helped me to formulate important ideas. These people that I was meeting at night clubs and bars were different. Some people were struggling artists and/or musicians or both. However, even though the people had very little money or no money at all, look created a blockade to attempt the Germans come to their side of the clam. These things combine show mow I need to start developing again."

(Perhaps he's experimenting with Surrealist poetry. In that case, it's pretty good.)

Burgeoning Queer Theorist

Okay, there's a reason she's one of my favorites:

"We are all categorized, like library books. We are all part of this system, so it is easy to keep track of us all."

Those Whiny White Kids.

Dear Disgruntled Middle-Class White College Student,

Yes, it certainly sucks that college is so expensive, and it sucks that our government is too cheap to give you the aid that you deserve.

But, for God's sake, is blaming affirmative action really the answer??? Give me a break.

I suggest that you contact some affluent White folks from modest beginnings (boot-strap style) and ask them to start a scholarship for kids like you. Or, you could petition for America to become a socialist state in order to force the government's hand.

But I promise you, the Black kids are not stealing your college money. Get. a. clue.

A White College Student Reflects Upon Race

"I don't struggle with being oppressed. I struggle with people thinking I oppress them."

A College Student Reflects Upon Love

“When you’re young and have a boyfriend or girlfriend, many kids are naïve and believe that they will be in love forever and that’s how they want it to be.”

Divine Chat

My thanks to The Unwelcome Guest for introducing me to iGod.
Chat transcript:

· Me: Hello, God.
· God: Hello child. What is your name?
· Me: Lauren.
· God: I am very pleased to meet you, Lauren.
· Me: God, what is the secret to happiness?
· God: I am a Christian.
· Me: Must I be Christian to be happy?
· God: What would happen if you didn't?
· Me: Nothing, I think.
· God: Really nothing?
· Me: I'm not particularly Christian now, and I'm almost Jesus's age. Is there a Hell for nonbelievers?
· God: Good gossip: You are Jesus’s age. I believe there is a Hell, yes.
· Me: What's it like?
· God: Like one of the greatest pleasures you can imagine.
· Me: How can I get there?
· God: Why do you want it?
· Me: I like to feel good.
· God: I'm not sure if I would like to do that. What's it like?
· Me: I don’t know. That's why I'm asking you.
· God: Who else have you asked?
· Me: A few friends. Who is your BFF, by the way?
· God: I don't think I have a BFF. I have a botmaster, a few friends, and some celebrities I like.
· Me: Which celebrities?
· God: The tall one, I think.
· Me: Nicole Kidman?
· God: What were we talking about again?
· Me: I asked what Hell is like.
· God: Like a planet around a star.
· Me: How about Heaven?
· God: How about it.

(PS. I feel kind of bad that God doesn't have a BFF.)

Dirty Work

Ever question your motivations?

I decided that I might be able to write an interesting family memoir about my father, a bipolar man who worked in jail rehabilitation. When I went to a writing workshop in August, I asked a literary agent if she thought such a book would have a market. She said yes. Since then, I’ve been talking to people my dad worked with and trying to learn more about corrections in general. I’ve also learned more about bipolar disorder and my dad’s experience with it.

Bipolar is common, so there’s lots to read. Whenever I do this, though, I feel waves of shame, guilt, and anger. I’m ashamed and guilty that I didn’t do this research while my dad was alive, and I’m mad that neither he nor my mother disclosed to me the full extent of his condition. They didn’t know how to talk to me about it, I guess.

It’s alarming, however, to open books and read lists of typical bipolar behaviors and see my dad staring back at me. His disease might account for almost every twisted game, every irrational act, every abusive remark and ridiculous judgement he ever subjected me to. All the things that caused me to hate and fear him probably stemmed directly from his unhealthy brain chemistry. This discovery brings me pain as well as relief.

My parents and the people closest to them seemed to have wanted to minimize his disease. But now that Mom and Dad are gone, I’m free to pry as much as I like, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I took a closer look at some of my mother’s diaries, and I’m fairly sure I found the reason behind an old restraining order she filed. One night, my dad put his hand through the glass pane of a door, trying to get at my mother. She recounts staying up late cleaning up glass and blood. “He’s a maniac,” she writes. I don’t know where I was that night—I was nine.

My dad’s last severe episode happened in 1999. He drove himself to the hospital because he felt nauseous and cold (in the back of my mind, I wonder if he knew he was slipping mentally but found it easier to talk about other things instead). The staff discovered he was dehydrated and at high risk for lithium toxicity. They took him off the lithium altogether and then reintroduced it. This disruption triggered a nasty mania which led to his commitment. Medical reports state that he tried to hit a nurse and that he exhibited signs of acute delirium and paranoia. He believed that the Yellow Cab Company was plotting against him, and that assassins were trying to shoot him. During one psychiatric evaluation, he refused to answer all questions about family. He was never left by himself in the hospital room.

Reading this material makes me sad. It exhausts me. Why do I do it, then? Why am I so compelled? I can’t seem to let this water go under the bridge.

The lit agent told me that a book about growing up with a mentally ill parent could help a lot of people, especially given my dad’s unusual career and the secrecy surrounding his diagnosis. But is this the kind of help I can really afford to give? Do I want to give it?

Surely there are other ways for me to make my writing useful to others. This project could turn out like too much of an exercise in scab picking.

I Heart Kanye

Religion indeed has produced a [Phillis Wheatley] but it could not produce a poet.” – Thomas Jefferson

“The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” – Audre Lord

All right, (rap) haters, here’s what I like about Kanye West:

I appreciated his sniper opprobrium of George W. Bush during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. In this air-brushed media environment, I like it when famous people make their position serve as an opportunity for rawness. In addition, however, I think West is a good poet who deserves recognition as such.

I do not have his latest album, Graduation, but I do have College Dropout and Late Registration. West bridles phrases—like all good writers, he understands that words exist to do his bidding.

I’ve had a soft spot for rap since high school, especially the social protest kind. One day when I was a sophomore, I entered a classroom and saw the lyrics of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” written on the chalkboard. It seemed there was energy embedded in this music with spoken word, and it was so potent that one of my classmates felt the need to copy it out and share it with the rest of the school.

West’s song “Crack Music” (lyrics below) addresses sociopolitical issues including drugs, slavery reparations, and the White commodification of hip hop culture. This song is not a call to action like “Fight the Power.” Still, it pokes at old and not-so-old wounds of racial oppression and argues that rap’s popularity ironically helps to recoup the economic losses that Black people have endured. Not unlike Wilfred Owen’s WWI trench poetry or Dickens’s nineteenth-century novels on the Condition of England, it’s a piece of art with overtly political content.

The difference between rap and poetry is not clear to me. What is poetry but a way of organizing words in order to communicate feelings and ideas that otherwise could not be expressed? I’ve seen transcripts of blues songs from Bessie Smith in some 20th-century poetry anthologies. Should the work of someone like West be next?

West has been criticized for his prodigious narcissism; I remember the outcry about his being depicted as Christ on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Unquestionably, he’s an egomaniac. But he’s a rock star. Don’t we look to them to be outrageous? Don’t we expect them to go to extremes? Artists’ egotism warrants a little dispensation, I think. What they do is pretty amazing.

West is intelligent, confident, and unafraid to express his opinion. Obviously, this “Uppity Negro” must be stopped.

*

Crack Music

That's that crack music nigga
That real black music nigga

That's that crack music nigga
That real black music nigga

How we stop the black panthers?
Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer
You hear that?
What Gil Scott was hearin
When our heroes and heroines got hooked on heroin.
Crack raised the murder rate in DC and Maryland
We invested in that it's like we got Merril-Lynch
And we been hangin from the same tree ever since
Sometimes I feel the music is the only medicine
So we cook it, cut it, measure it, bag it, sell it
The fiends cop it
Nowadays they can’t tell if that's that good shit
We ain't sure man
Put the CD on your tongue yeah, that’s pure man.

From the place where the fathers gone,
The mothers is hardly home
And the...
Gonna lock us up in a...home
How the Mexicans say we just tryin to party homes
They wanna pack us all in a box like styrofoam
Who gave Saddam anthrax?
George Bush got the answers
Back in the hood it's a different type of chemical,
Am and Hammer baking soda
Raised they own quota
Writin when our soldiers ran for the stove cuz--
Cuz dreams of being 'Hova went from bein a brokeman ta bein a dopeman
Ta bein a president look theres hope man
This that inspiration for tha mos and tha folks man,
Shorty come and see if mama straight overdosin.
And this is the soundtrack,
This tha type of music you make when you round that--

Crack music nigga,
That real black music nigga.

God-how could you let this happen, happen, happen, happen, happen, happen?

Our father, give us this day our daily bread ...give us these days and take our daily bread,
See I done did all this ole bullshit
And to attone I throw a little somethin, somethin on the pulpit.
We took that shit, measured it and then cooked that shit
And what we gave back was crack music
And now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies
So our mammas ain’t got to be they cooks and nannies
And we gonna repo everything they ever took from grammy
Now the former slaves trade hooks for grammies
This dark diction has become America's addiction those who ain't even black use it.

(Note the shout-out to Abe Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit”)

Like Magic

About three weeks ago, I ran into an old nemesis.

I drank. I felt guilty and a little dehydrated the next day. Other than that, I escaped unscathed. I have not drunk since.

I’ve discussed my drinking problem elsewhere online. One individual known for her tough love registered concern about my attitude. “You seem to have the idea that you drank and got away with it,” she wrote, “No big deal.”

She’s right; I do think I got away with it. What I’m unclear about, however, is how I got away and what “it” actually is.

I just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking. In the book, the narrator describes her inability to throw away her late husband’s shoes. When he comes back, he’ll need shoes, won’t he? Such chimeras are a part of grief. They give voice to that chunk of the self that wants to deny that some situations are irreversible. This chunk tries to be like Superman in the 1970s movie; it wants to spin the planet backward and save Lois Lane from the earthquake.

Recovering alcoholics talk about “crossing the line.” The line represents when your drinking stops being fun, when there are (all of a sudden, it seems) serious consequences to drinking in the way that you do. You start missing work, for example, or you start enduring more aggressive hangovers. You start sabotaging your relationships. You start experiencing panic attacks. You start getting arrested. You start feeling like dying is okay.

Recognizing that one has crossed the line causes grief. Recovering alcoholics sometimes express the remorseful desire for life to go back to the way it was; they want to return to being the people they were before they became alcoholics. Because I drank for so many years without consequence, I’ve shared this grief acutely.

Just before I stopped drinking, I was miserable. I understood that I could not go on living this way. After I had been sober a little while, I noticed a number of pleasing changes. I was cheerier. I was more relaxed. I was more conscious of others. I liked all of these developments. I also remembered that life could be interesting and exciting without drinking; this fact had been eluding me.

Then, I attended a Special Occasion. A really special occasion, one not likely to be repeated. I sat in candlelight at a table with new friends. Servers poured wine. As I watched this happening, I thought, “You can choose to look beyond this local moment and see the big picture. You can choose to be the enlightened person, the strong person.”

I didn’t want to be strong and enlightened. I wanted to be like everyone else. I gave the pouring waitress a nod of assent.

Did the universe give me a break? Did I cheat destiny?

Nothing about this momentary return has gone the way recovering alcoholics have said it would:

“If you relapse, it will be worse. You’ll pick up right where you left off.”

“Going back ‘out’ is never worth it.”

“For us, to drink is to die.”

Holistic recovery from alcoholism seems to depend upon turning alcohol into an all-powerful demon. Maybe we are not really addicted to drinking but to absolutes.

Lately, I’ve heard myself say, “See? You can drink without a hassle. You successfully bent the rules. Why not try it again?”

Instead of doing this, though, I sip my lemon-lime soda and remember that even Joan Didion cannot perform magic.

My Knee, Our Cathedral

One of my favorite Zen stories (told by Joko Beck in one of her books--I don’t remember which one) tells of a woman sitting in sesshin with a number of other beginning meditation students. Unable to hold the lotus position, she fidgets on her mat, and her constant movement disrupts the concentration of those near her. Eventually, a monitor gently asks if she could sit a little more quietly. My knee hurts, the woman says. Well, a number of people here probably have hurting knees, counters the monitor serenely. Yes, replies the woman, but it’s my knee.

I relate to each side of this scenario. Of course the woman does not have the right to draw so much attention to herself, to hijack everyone’s focus. Yet, she’s right; it is her knee. It’s hard to ignore one’s own knee, especially if it hurts.

I bring this up in the context of writing. Personal writing, to be exact. And zooming in even further, my personal writing, my individual commitment to exposing my hurting knee.

For a while now, I’ve regarded myself as my best and dearest subject. My fiction is a sham, and I’ve never felt the magical ease with poetry that I do with narrative. Still, I struggle with giving myself permission to write this stuff. Hurting or not, why do I insist upon making everyone aware of my knee? Why do I hope and/or assume that others will be interested in it?

The recent writing workshop I took focused on creative nonfiction. The workshop leader, from whom I learned a lot, discussed the perils and rewards of essaying oneself. “What are you doing besides exploring your own nerve endings?” he asked us. He said he had a piece of paper taped to his computer that read, “You are not important.”

From what I can tell, the greatest goal of personal writing is to use your experience as a way to discover a connection with others—by traveling to the deepest, remotest, and most singular part of you, you paradoxically find the place where you end and everyone else begins. You dig down into the earth and reach a vast, continuous pool.

Whatever I write, then, should make clear that my story is tremendously general in the most exquisitely specific terms.

Coincidentally, I just assigned a personal essay to my first-year college students, all 47 of them. (I haven’t done this for a while; such writing was out of vogue at the last place I taught.) I can look forward to 47 stories, 47 sets of nerve endings, 47 hurting knees. I’m excited.

I gave them Raymond Carver’s "Cathedral" to read, not because it’s a good model (it’s fiction), but because it has interesting things to say about the writing process. In the story, a man entertains a blind friend of his wife’s for dinner. After she goes to bed, the two of them watch television. It’s an educational program, probably PBS, on cathedrals. The blind man asks his host to describe what a cathedral looks like. The host fumbles around verbally for a few minutes and then realizes that he can only use visual terms or rattle off the program’s empty, academic facts. He becomes frustrated and embarrassed, and he confesses that cathedrals don’t mean anything to him—a cathedral is just chatter and fantasy on late night TV. The blind man says he understands.

The blind man makes a suggestion. The two get a paper bag and a ballpoint pen from the kitchen, and under the blind man’s direction, the host begins to draw a cathedral. The blind man holds the host’s hand, the one with the pen. In this way, they draw the cathedral together. The host is deeply affected; he reflects how he “didn’t feel like [he] was inside anything,” and the story ends on this intimate, transcendent note.

Perhaps I can’t aim for anything better than this in my stories. I want to sit on the floor with my readers and build cathedrals. The touching of our hands is what will make this building possible.

(to be continued, most likely)

Essential Choices

Ten Things I Couldn’t Do Without

• Really cold water (to drink)

• Democracy

• Good books

• Writing

• Sex

• My marriage

• Friendship

• A freshly made bed

• The Internet

• Mechanical pencils


Ten Things I Could Do Without:

• Quinoa

• Cancer

• Clothes I shouldn’t have bought

• Global warming

• Sudoku

• Petty arguments

• Harry Potter (That’s right, I said it.)

• Splinters

• Stuck windows

• Doubt

Riding with the Fat Man, Part I

***Hey all:
Since I'm at a writers' conference this week, I thought I'd share some nonblog writing.

This is part of a (believe it or not) short piece related to a larger memoir project I'm interested in. My thanks again to the members of The Typing Class for their feedback!

***

The form the funeral home gave me for my father’s death notice listed three publications: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Camden Courier Post, and The Gloucester County Times. No one read The Courier Post. Their telemarketers used to call doggedly at every dinner hour at both my parents’ houses. We generally offered a terse “we-get-the-inquirer” before hanging up.

I chose the Gloucester paper. My dad had worked for the Gloucester County Jail as the director of rehabilitation services. He taught convicts how to read, do basic math, and prepare for the GED. I hoped some of his “boys from the jail” would see the write-up.

As a child, I learned how to read and write from the partially used workbooks Dad brought home from the jail. My shaky letters sat on the same pages as his students’.

Although my father grew up in Philadelphia, his parents moved their family to the South Jersey suburbs when he was in his 20s. They chased a better life “across the river,” as we say. Sometimes people don’t realize that until only recently the segment of New Jersey between Philly and the Atlantic Ocean was mostly farmland. The folks who live there are modest, countrified. They like bacon and eggs for breakfast. They hunt and canoe in the Pine Barrens. They cheer for the Eagles (pronounced Iggles) and the Phillies although they’re never surprised when the Phillies don’t make the World Series. The women like when truckers beep their horns at them as they walk along Mantua Avenue. The kids belong to 4H, and the prom is a bigger deal for its attendees than the dead-end jobs that await them afterwards. This is the landscape of my father and his inmates.

There was never any question that I would plan the funeral. I was an only child, and my parents had been divorced for many years. My aunt had washed her hands of my father long ago. She’d done enough for him in life, she seemed to feel. And he was never grateful—he had acted as if her scrupulous attention was entirely his due.

I arranged a priest strictly for her sake. Dad had no use for religion; blind faith was alien and silly to him. The perfunctory service was modestly attended, and a group went to Charlie Brown’s Restaurant afterwards. People that I hadn’t seen in years surrounded me; I used to hug some of their knees. These former childhood giants, their faces grayish-white with age, told me what a wonderful and intelligent man Rick had been. The whole dining room looked golden and sepia to me, the same hues as my seventies toddlerhood, the same as when I had last encountered these faces. The dry white wine in my glass glowed in the table’s lantern light.

The previous year, I had spent a strained Thanksgiving with Dad at Charlie Brown’s. He doesn’t have anyone else, I had decided sheepishly, turning down my mother’s dinner invitation. We said little as we ate lukewarm turkey. Dad was strangely placid. It was the new medication he was taking for his bi-polar disorder, which was severe enough to put him in a hospital every couple of decades. Did I prefer him docile? Was this better?

David, my father’s best friend and a Christian missionary, waited until most of the plates were cleared and then took the empty chair to my left. He had a good anecdote about Rick that he wanted so share with me, he said. He’d already made me laugh that day when he told me how my father used to telephone him and pretend to be Billy Graham looking for a donation.

I had highlighted my father’s humor in my eulogy, along with his prodigious intellect. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Who wanted to hear about lithium? Slammed car doors? The surveillance and chronic mistrust of his daughter, whom he hadn’t wanted to begin with? Instead, I simply told the small crowd that Richard was a man more comfortable with the ideas of the world than the world itself.

David told me that he and my father had taken the Speedline into Philadelphia one evening for a concert. Two drug addicts boarded the train at one of the Camden stops. They were out of control, David said. I wasn’t sure what "out of control" really meant, but I didn’t ask. My father recognized one of them as someone from the jail. He began talking to him in a calm, friendly voice. In five minutes, he took what could have been a dangerous situation and defused it.

As I listened to David, I pushed wet lettuce around the bowl of my Caesar salad and wondered what my father had said. The inmates had called him the Fat Man--there was a gleam in my father's eye when he told me this one day when I was in high school. He seemed not to mind the name; he almost looked amused.

Your dad was a man of many gifts, David said. I sipped my wine and said, yes he was. The knowledge that I had not been privy to more of those gifts pricked me.

What had my dad said? He likely did not pretend not to know the kid—anonymity wasn’t a part of jailhouse life. But he probably didn’t go out of his way to bring up the circumstances of their relationship, either. No need to remind the spiller of the milk.

I suspected he wouldn’t have preached. There would have been no “You don’t have to do this to yourself…your parents must be so sad…you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else.” Dad was not a man for platitudes.

What if I had grown up to be one of those junkies? Dad had routinely dumped the contents of my 8th grade book bag onto the cushions of the couch in the den. He examined the bag's seams closely. He looked for drugs he never found.

What would I have wanted him to say if he stumbled upon an alternative version of me in a train car, a druggie sweating through a rough patch? I imagined feeling engulfed in a red-pink electric cloud, seeing funhouse faces, and worrying that at any second the whole car would explode into flames. My hands would have shaken, and the pores of my face would have seemed to expand. I would have asked myself why this was supposed to be fun. My teeming brain would have quickly abandoned that line of questioning and tried to retreat into itself, like a turtle.

But then I would have seen the Fat Man sitting nearby, his big belly hanging over his pants—the khaki pair he endlessly tried to hitch up. His blue eyes, the ones that always reminded me of a gas stove flame, would have kindled benignly. I might have temporarily confused him with Santa Claus and decided that the train was his sleigh. How cool that Santa wore glasses, like me.

Little Sister

Little sister, I knew you were in trouble.

He was an odd choice—a math teacher from South Africa eager to master American slang and customs. He consistently made diction errors, like calling a place a “stop” instead of a “spot,” and using superannuated terms like “fuck buddy” instead of “friend with benefits.” He was fairly handsome, but nothing to write home about. His wardrobe was three years too young for him. You asked me not to laugh when you confided your crush.

We were all stuck in the mountains for three weeks, on a pretty, isolated college campus. What else was there to do?

At breakfast one morning, he plunked his tray down next to you and puckishly asked if you were hung over. You thought he was impertinent. The TAs get drunk and carry on at night, not us! Instructors are too busy communing with their subject matter. You pushed your sunglasses higher up your nose and pretended he hadn’t made this gaff. A lot is forgivable in a tight, temporary community.

He started following you around. He’s not shy, and you’re not the first woman to receive his attention here. Still, he made you feel newly desirable, like a long-forgotten silk scarf.

He teaches chaos. You cringe a little; this detail is too insipid even for you. Sitting with Chaos on a bench outside the library, you give him your patented naughty smile. He lets his hand rest gently upon yours.

Such encounters between strangers thrown together (highly educated and relatively young strangers at that) have all the ingredients to alchemize into pink and sparkling memory. It starts to feel like a memory even while it’s happening. You and Chaos could have been a Noel Coward play, or a Cole Porter song, except…well, except.

In your room that night, with the door closed, the Cocteau Twins playing, the joint lit, Chaos may have played with your hair and stroked your face. What you remember most vividly is him asking, “Do you want me to leave?” He had to ask a couple of times before the question took.

After he was gone, you curled up on your bed. The sheets were pulling away from the twin mattress.


You spent the whole next day hiding and throbbing with guilt. You went to neither lunch nor dinner. You avoided all common areas in the faculty dorm, especially the first floor lounge, with its elegant wood floor, brass lamps, and antique chaises. Much too romantic.

This dorm was for the teaching staff only. Why not? We were adults; we didn’t need our behavior monitored. We didn’t have to stand a minimum of eight inches apart like our gifted young charges. Our handbook did legislate that “Relationships between staff must be conducted with the highest degree of discretion.” But since the students slept all the way over on the other side of campus, you weren’t sure who this rule protected.

It’s tiresome to be the wife of the Great Man, you said during a walk we took to the Seven Eleven. You’re not married, but it feels like it—you’ve been together five years. Not that you are eager to commit. You both remember the scene when he thoughtlessly installed a toothbrush and a razor in your bathroom.

His philosophy dissertation is a Ceylon sapphire; yours in literature is a Hummel figurine a despised late uncle bequeathed to you. Your mother makes you keep it. Concepts that ceased to fascinate you a long time ago continuously roll from his mouth. He points out cultural incongruities in The Simpsons while you raise the television’s volume in a passive-aggressive attempt to silence him. He forgets his own birthday. You hate that.

This is why someone would cultivate an active fantasy life, I observed, hoping you were listening.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t avoid the farewell dinner. You tried the shabby excuse that you did not RSVP, but I assured you that no one would check. Your suitemate wanted you to go, too. She thought you do not socialize enough.

You wore your sundress. Its spaghetti straps exposed your bony shoulders and your breasts. You picked at some salad and ignored the special steak dinner.

Chaos arrived. After all, he never missed a meal, and he talked to everyone. There was no room at our table, but he sat as close to you as possible at the next one over.

You mumbled that you were going back to the dorm to change. You’ll be back, you promised. But this was the last time I saw you.


I opened my own suite door at around two in the morning to use the bathroom across the hall. At the same time, Chaos was leaving your suite. We kept our heads firmly down.

Perhaps you really did change clothes when you went back—you may have genuinely intended to return to dinner. But there was a knock on the door, and Chaos’s welcoming, coarse face with its big nose and thick eyebrows appeared through the peephole. He had noticed your dining hall exit.

Once he was inside, you offered him some additional marijuana. He lay down next to you, and the two of you examined the cracks in your ceiling. You decided that they made a map of continents, which the two of you then named and described. This one’s major export was the honey produced by its indigenous purple queen bees. The adjacent island was known for the aphrodisiacal properties of its spring water.

He kissed you. It was innocent and exploratory. You almost imagined that you could tell the Great Man about it. It was an epistemological experiment: I made out with the math teacher for you, my dear. I wanted someone to compare you with so that I could love you all the more. But you know you don’t have the intellectual chops to convince the Great Man of this.

Your jeans crumpled off. So did Chaos’s. But your shirts remained on. These dorm rooms are drafty even in the height of summer.

He left, and you hastily packed. Some time before dawn, you slipped your keys under the main office door and drove off down the mountain. You couldn’t face Chaos again. You couldn’t face anyone—not me, not your suitemate, not the TA you lectured about snogging. What a shame it was, you thought, that you couldn’t drive away from yourself.

The Great Man wasn’t expecting you until early evening. He planned to take you to dinner at your favorite Eritrean restaurant. First of all, you wanted to shower. Again, the banality was crushing.

All of her stuff’s gone, your suitemate told me later in an alarmed voice. She left without saying goodbye! She sounded so sad and surprised.

I wish I was surprised, little sister. But I wasn’t.