Ice

Phase three. (Will it ever end?)

I’m taking a couple of days off next week to get cranking with the final, pre-August draft of Faceless Men. Sometimes I think that if Mr. Medicine hates the book and tells me to stuff it under the mattress, I might be secretly relieved. No rejections, no publication, no potential Averil-outing where my identity is revealed and my children recoil in horror at what their saintly mother has been writing behind closed doors all these months.

In fact, as the fantasy of publication takes hold, I’m beginning to feel the ice forming between my toes. Maybe this was a bad idea. I mean, would I be expected to meet people, face-to-face? On the off-chance that the book lands me an agent and the agent lands me a publisher, would I then be deployed to promote it? Is that a requirement or an option? How does it work for a pseudonymous author? How does it work with smut? Surely no one will expect me to parade around with a Faceless Men sandwich board hanging off my shoulders, right? I won’t find myself at a book launch in my honor, hovering over the aioli while some pasty-faced man in a sports coat asks me in adenoidal tones how to locate the g-spot and whether his relationship with Charlotte the blow-up doll is an appropriate topic for first-date conversation. Right?

Deep breath. Just finish the fucker, Averil. You can hyperventilate later.

What would turn your dream of publication into a nightmare?

CJ says . . .

If I were a fish, I thought, I’d like grasshoppers. Their leggy bodies moved like drawings against the confines of the Mason jar.

Dragonflies skimmed the surface of the water racing liquid shadows. Grandma cast her pole in and leaned back on the gravel sandbar, big legs stretched stick straight, ankles crossed, rod in one hand, and line in the other, feeling for movement, and waiting.

I sat beside her memorizing the shape and color of plants along the creek bank, watching the sky as the sun shifted, feeling safe on the crumbling bank.

Picked grass and braided it like hair.

Organized twigs into piles by shape and scale; peeled gray bark off like skinned knees and ran my fingers over the hard surface.

What have you seen today?

 

Flash

I’ve calmed down today, you’ll be glad to know. Haven’t gone for any Republican eye sockets with my stiletto, or attempted to locate Newt’s family jewels with my knee. We may get through this election cycle yet.

I have to tell you, it’s difficult to know who to be sometimes. We all have strong opinions–we are writers, after all–but I have never learned how to argue a point without becoming shrill or feeling the need to apologize or capitulate. Now, for instance, I want to tell all my male friends that of course yesterday’s post wasn’t about you, it was about the tea-baggers and sugar daddies and the Rick Santorums of the world who want to take back one of the most fundamental tools for female equality.

A month or two ago, I would have been certain you’d already know that, but lately I feel my voice lacking in nuance, teetering on the edge of caricature. It’s a little disconcerting to see where that is going. When I hear myself described I sometimes have to read my name a couple of times to be certain there isn’t another Averil knocking about. It makes me wonder who I am becoming in this reality. An f-bombing Betty Boop? A pin-up girl with an expression of helpless surprise and a tendency to flash her polyester knickers? A modern day Lauren Bacall with a straight razor under her pillow and a pair of handcuffs dangling from the bedpost? Roseanne Barr trying to flirt? Who the fuck am I?

Who are you?

If you were to make a caricature of your online persona, what would you look like to me?

Hinges

I’m out for a walk. It’s late at night and I should be locked inside my house like a good girl, a smart girl, but after a week of advice about how us “gals” should clench an aspirin between our knees and call it contraception, how we should be subjected to pre-abortion vaginal ultrasounds, how our health issues should be debated by a panel of men without a single female representative, a walk alone after dark feels like an act of rebellion.

I am one small fist, shaking at the sky. One small nothing of a person in a sea of bigger, louder, stronger people who would move heaven and earth to get inside me and then treat my body like collateral damage.

But that’s what men do, you say, I don’t need to go along. It’s entirely up to me to keep my knees together though it’s man’s divine mission to part them. I should be virtuous, impervious, an angel in white. And if you talk to me in that deep, sweet way you have, that way that melts my hinges, if you coax and cajole and seduce me, it’s not your fault. You’re doing what men do. I should do what women do: resist. Every man, every time, because if I don’t there may be consequences. No consequences for you, of course, because it’s not your problem. If I would keep my heart to itself and my pleats neatly pressed and my goddamn knees together, this great country of ours could return to its former glory, when white men ruled the world and a woman “in trouble” would drop out of sight for three months and then reappear, slender and saintly once more, or bloodied (deservedly, though it saddens you) after she’d maimed herself trying to rip your seed from her body with a coat hanger.

Now, now, you say, calm yourself. We don’t do that anymore. We only want to slow you down, shame you with this eye on a wand in the hopes that maybe, if we look closely enough at the source of the problem, we can see where the screws came loose and tighten them. Be still, let us investigate. Let us see what can be done.

(You’re dying to know what’s in there, aren’t you? Desperate to know from whence the siren calls and how to make it stop.)

And what if something did happen tonight while I’m out for a walk. Would you say I deserved it? Would you say I’ve become too fast and too free? If Uncle Hal finds my door unlocked at night, is that also my fault? Is it always, every time, my responsibility to keep out of your way? Is it always yours to control me?

Let me tell you, Foster Friess and Rick Santorum and the rest of you sanctimonious hypocrites to the right of Rush Limbaugh, I am small and my voice is tiny but it belongs to me. I will part my knees when it suits me and I will fall on them if my lover asks me and I will wear a corset under my scrubs and a garter under my skirt and I will lift that skirt when and if it pleases me.

I may be donning stilettos, but you’ll never catch me.

(Comments are off for this one. I seem to be foaming at the mouth and don’t want to inflict myself on my friends.)

Tetman says. . .

If you want to be a strong writer–no matter what you’re writing–you have to look in the mirror. And you have to do it while you’re not looking, so you’ll see who’s really there.

Photograph by Russell James

What are the essential ingredients of good writing?