Really Real

I’m at the coffee shop. This is the last of a four-day stretch of revisions and tonight I’m winding down. I’ll be back at the office tomorrow and Thursday, after which I’ve got four more days lined up. Bring on the caffeine.

My sister asked me over lunch why I’m doing all this. Since I won’t publish under my real name (if I publish at all, this novel could well end up in a drawer or possibly the shredder), what’s the point? I would have thought it was about being recognized for your work, she said. Averil Dean doesn’t exist, so where’s the recognition?

I didn’t know how to answer her at first. Part of me understands what she means–after all, recognition is the goal of most creative endeavors, and until she asked I would have assumed it was the point for me as well. But considered in those terms, I’ve realized that maybe writing is not about recognition, or if it is, perhaps the word has come to mean something to me that has nothing to do with my name(s). After all, it’s still me, doing the work; whatever I call myself, these are still my hands. This is my mind, creating the story. This is my eye, my heart. Does it matter that I’m building a life as a writer, completely unconnected to my “real” self? Does it matter that you’d look right past me on the street?

No. Not to me, not anymore. My goals have evolved beyond that, or maybe they’ve shrunk. Writing has become deeply personal, an exploration of who I am and how I see the world. Whether I call myself Averil or Lauren or Zoë or Sue, recognition is beside the point except as it exists in me.

Though if someone wanted to throw some money my way, I’d tell them how to make out the check.

Do you associate recognition with your name? If you wrote and published anonymously, would it bother you not to claim your work?

Johnny Appleseed – Guest Post by Anonymous

My husband is the Johnny Appleseed of vibrators. He is the kind of guy who had a ton of female friends and none of them ever saw him as anything more. He was always cynically and so earnestly in love with yet another waif who fucked him over and broke his heart. Maybe he cooked for her and she gained some weight. Maybe he said I love you too soon. Maybe his jokes had a little too much of an edge.

Before my husband, I had never had a vibrator, and it’s, as my southern friend says, a goddamned disgrace. I think about the years I was single or uneasily dating someone who was never quite available enough and lacked the silver bullet, that steady consistent hand. All the while, my husband was living in another city accompanying his female friends to the mechanic so they wouldn’t get ripped off. In the early days of the Internet, he bought vibrators for his female friends when they were too embarrassed or scared to go into adult bookstores alone. And somehow he did it without being skeevy.

When he was fifteen, and his sister was fourteen and showed signs of being boy crazy, and he, blushing, mumbling, in his Catholic school uniform, offered to buy her condoms. Later on, he helped his friends pick out sex toys and encouraged them to sleep with or dump a range of men. He thought all women should have vibrators. And I have to say I’m a believer.

Sometime he uses the vibrator when his fingers are tired. And I use it consistently when he’s away. He’s a hard-working man, if you know what I mean. He will go down on me when I have my period, which is more than I can say for myself in my days of dating women. Dating and marrying a bisexual woman worked out for him too. Bisexual women don’t always need a hard manly chest to lean against. I am unthreatened by his child-bearing hips and his skills in the kitchen. We scope out women together (all look, no touch). And he’s a straight man who can buy me clothes and change my oil. And if that doesn’t sound like a euphemism, then I’m doing it all wrong.

Why are men so much more practical about sexuality? Why are we so embarrassed by the whole thing?

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.)