Guest Post – by Anonymous

Minor Treachery

When I was twenty-two, I fell in love with a man who had a girlfriend. We went out for drinks and I didn’t let my hand brush his over the table. I snuck off to see him at the coffee shop where he worked. His black hair was tied back and as I stood there, waiting for him to finish making a cappuccino, I wanted nothing more than to feel his mouth on me, his hair splashing across my skin. But when he turned, I smiled lightly and joked, took my small cup of coffee and walked out alone. I tried to play it cool. I was not the kind of person who broke up relationships.

I moved away and he married his girlfriend, as I knew he would. Although I was invited to the wedding, I did not make the trip. A few years later, they came up to visit me on their way somewhere else. We took the subway together after lunch. His wife found a seat in the busy car and he and I stood in the aisle near her, holding onto the overhead bar. I looked up. His face was inches from mine, as it is when you stand with someone on the subway, as if you were going to kiss. I looked down quickly. I did not measure the space between our bodies, I did not need to; I could feel the heat coming from his skin. When I looked up again, he had moved halfway down the car.

I met a man whom I loved. We got married. I was not worried about being faithful. It was hard enough for me to get laid when I was single, I didn’t imagine it would be a problem now. And then facebook came along. I friended the man who I used to know after years of being out of touch. Just his name on the screen brought it all back, the sting of lust, the time in my life when I equated desire with wistfulness, a thing that would never be satisfied.

I still love him. It is a small, warm love, like the love I have for my friends, except that it is laced with desire. I see pictures of his wife and I’m jolted by the thought that she gets to have sex with him and I never will.

The love for my husband is different. It’s the way he talks, it’s the way he makes me laugh without even trying, and the way I curl my fingers into the flesh of his arms. Every day we wind our lives ever more tightly together, not to become one person, we are too ornery for that, but we’re learning to make our choices, in part, for each other.

That sounds so unromantic. Our love is compromise. But how else does one accomplish the complicated, difficult task of living with another human being? We no longer have sex four times in an afternoon, quietly each time so my roommates didn’t hear, my shoulder, my mouth muffling his cries. But every time his hand meets my skin, some part of me remembers that afternoon, the way my face was sensitive the rest of the day, as if I had a fever, the way I felt the warm length of his body against my back and wanted never to leave my bed again.

And so what do I do with my minor treachery? For years I felt guilty that I was in love with a married man. Now I feel guilty that I love him still. But I try to keep the love in perspective, to keep it small. To not imagine things that are unrealistic. To use the desire for one to proposition the other. Not once have I watched my husband come in my arms, his face smooth and open, and wished he were anyone else.

Tell me about a quiet love, a small love that lives behind the bigger one.

Light

It’s Monday afternoon. Drew has taken our son off for a walk around the lake, and I’m watching them from my bedroom window. It’s a beautiful day, cool and thinly clouded, a soft breeze stirring patterns of light into the leaves over their heads. Drew is gesturing about how you have to be careful crossing the street, he’s pointing out the playgrounds and the wetlands that border our community. Beside him, my son looks so small, the nape of his neck heartbreakingly bare, hands in his pockets as he lifts his chin to take a cautious look around.

We are here, we three. Our family unit has shrunk. My head feels light now, as after a major haircut, when you forget you no longer have to push your hair aside on the pillow or take such a big handful of shampoo. At the grocery store, I found myself reaching for a second gallon of milk, a container of cream cheese, an extra tube of toothpaste–things I used to buy for the teenagers, things we no longer need. I’m not sure how to feel about that. I’m lighter. Much, much lighter. But I miss the weight of my children.

Still, for all the sadness of goodbye, our new home is wonderful. Every morning is Christmas, with the scent of excitement in the air–and so much to unwrap! Our possessions are blooming in the empty space, easing into the edges and corners. Here are my cookbooks, the copper pitcher I bought in Germany, my grandmother’s paintings. Everett’s stuffed monkey, a conch shell from California. The picture of my mother and me, taken when I was three. All our keepsakes, the snarled detritus (goddamned power cords), the pots and pans and shoes and sheets and lamps, piano and desk, computers, flower pots, spoons and sweaters and photographs. I wish we were filming the unpacking in time-lapse photography. It would be like watching a seed erupt from the soil.

I’ve wanted to write before now, and tell you about the trip through the desert. Already the landscape is like an apocalyptic dream, dust rising as smoke from the ashy sand, desiccated pools of salt where nothing grows for miles, and ahead of me the trundling van containing everything we own. Like following an amiable Cerberus out of the underworld and into the clouds.

Definitely into the clouds.

Listen, do you hear that? A far-off choir of angels is singing: Portlaaaand, Portlaa-aaa-nd . . .

We have arrived!

Where are you?

Photograph by Ellen Von Unwerth

Billboards

Photograph by Todd Hido

It’s 5:54 am. Everything we own is boxed, stacked, disassembled and unusable. Everyone’s asleep, mattresses on the floor. This will be the worst day of the move, a day of hard work and cramming and stress and goodbyes. Lots of goodbyes.

I hope my kids understand how much I need to do this. The life I’ve been living, buried in my head, calling myself a victim of circumstance as the years tick by, has got to stop. I have finally learned the lesson I most want to teach them: Do not be passive in pursuit of your dreams. Make a plan, work it, whinge as necessary to any poor soul who wanders within earshot, but keep putting one foot in front of the other.

That’s how you cross the Sahara, little chickadees.

I’m not sure what kind of internet access we’re going to have over the next week. I’ll post if I can. In the meantime . . .

What would you write on a billboard? Gimme your soundbite wisdom, your two-bit cliché, your dad’s best bit of Al Bundyesque advice.

Lost and Found

Things I found while packing:

• A Polaroid camera, a Holga, and a set of collapsible scrims
• Three spoons (under my daughter’s bed)
• A box of Vitamin C, two bottles of cough syrup, and last year’s pink-eye drops
• A full set of china
• A tea strainer (no one here drinks tea)
• A roasting pan with a rack for chicken or beast; immediately after this purchase I went vegetarian
• A red satin g-string
• One set of handcuffs, closed around the strap of the aforementioned g-string
• Sixteen candy wrappers (under my daughter’s bed)
• A plastic light saber, two Nerf rocket launchers, and one authentic sword
• A gold brocade coat, with fake fur at cuffs and collar
• A wedding quilt made by Drew’s aunt
• Film. Film. Film. Film.
• Approximately nine hundred unidentifiable power cords
• A pair of strappy silver stilettos, complete with hooker rhinestones across the toes
• A dozen orthodontic rubber bands (under my daughter’s bed)
• Seven laptops Drew had salvaged for parts; he traded the whole stack for a used iPad
• A full bottle of Ed Hardy perfume
• Four users manuals for appliances we no longer own
• A chest full of Kids’ Cuties – crayon drawings galore, and glitter!
• A congealed lava lamp (under my daughter’s bed)
• Piggy, my oldest son’s favorite stuffed animal from back in the day
• Notebooks. Everywhere, notebooks, with my stories all over them.

What’s in your lost-and-found?

Photograph by Ellen Von Unwerth

Happening

Six more days. The truck will be here next Wednesday morning, and we’ll be on our way. I have a strange, uneasy feeling that something awful will happen to fuck it up. It’s that tense moment before your dream date arrives, when you’re certain he meant to call some other girl or has been staging a long and elaborate joke at your expense. Surely this is not really happening for me. I can’t really, finally be moving to Oregon.

But other good things are happening, have happened without a hitch. My daughter graduated yesterday. She didn’t fail her final exams, or forget to get some crucial paper signed, or trip down the stage after receiving her diploma. Not that any of that was likely. Just possible. But she sidestepped all those obstacles and graduated with her class, and afterward we gave her a laptop and took her to brunch and it all turned out just fine. My baby is grown up. She’s happy and healthy and out with her friends tonight to celebrate. A tiny voice in my head is whispering, See there? Nothing up my sleeve.

And this was Drew’s last day on the job. Everyone at work was nice to him and he got all the money he was entitled to and some letters of recommendation and it all went fine. He’ll be taking over the logistics of this move and for that I am grateful. He’s the kind of man who makes things turn out okay. I cling to his arm (ever helpful), he wields the machete, and together we always manage to get through the jungle with nothing more serious than a couple of scratches. (Which he’ll attend to, since he’s remembered the first aid kit.)

It’s going to happen. It really is.

I’m not letting Drew out of my sight.

Do you worry at the end?

Dot Dot Dot

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone this week, mostly for business-related conversations in which I would like to appear poised and in control, a person to be reckoned with. However, my speaking voice is that of a 14-year-old girl (Is your mother home?) and I have the world’s worst timing. I talk at the wrong place, or stop talking at the wrong place, or ramble into a verbal ellipsis in which the question I was asked recedes into a gentle and faraway joke I can’t recall. Cue the nervous giggle.

Isn’t it possible, in this day and age, to do away with the phone conversation? Could I send an email, a letter, a smoke-ring missive? Could we talk face-to-face? Scrabble it out? Can I sign my answers from across the room, or fly a tiny airplane with a banner trailing behind: Dinner Tuesday, 7:00 Mimi’s. How about a text. A tweet. Graffiti on the wall. A crayoned Valentine cut from red construction paper with a glued-on doily and a sackful of candy hearts tied with a ribbon.

Anything. Anything but the phone.

Telephone. Friend or foe?

Photograph by Ellen Von Unwerth

Gone Girl

This one’s got me eating my heart out. Read it, I beg of you.

What’s on your bedside table tonight?

Grandmothers

Yesterday we had lunch at my sister’s house. Veggie sandwiches, fruit salad, my niece’s deviled eggs and my mom’s lemon cake, and buckets of peaches from the tree out back, small and lopsided and so heavy with juice that they had to be eaten over the kitchen sink. We drank pineapple wine, lightened with seltzer, and shuffled around with our plates in hand to perch as we always do: the men at one table, talking about cars and airplanes; women at the other, taking on the problems of the world.

My grandmother was there, tiny as a child but swathed in purple glass beads, firmly wigged, her lipstick applied with the brush she keeps in a caddy on her dressing table. She smells of lavender powder, and the skin seems to drape over her cheekbones and pool like a velvet curtain around her neck, all folds and soft creases in the fabric of her. She’s the smartest person at the table, holding forth in ladylike Aussie tones on the topics of religion (nonsense!), reality shows (did you see The Batchelor, dearie?), and politics, tossing up her gnarled hands and raising her hand-drawn eyebrows about the foolishness of the Republican party (what a bunch of children!). She’s got life pretty well figured out. She keeps my mom hopping.

When she said goodbye to Drew, she patted his chest and adjusted his collar, ran her little hand across his shoulder as he smiled down at her and promised to keep us well.

Photograph by Joyce Tenneson

This Friday we’re planning to drive up to see his grandmother, who lives in Arizona. She’s about the same age as my grandma, but has only recently moved from her trailer in the desert–where she used to sweep the dirt in the front yard to keep it neat, which worked surprisingly well–to the assisted living home where she lives now. Everyone in Drew’s enormous family loves Nana to bits. She’s incredibly warm and kind and doted-upon in the best possible way, a way that makes you feel she’s earned it. I think it will be said at her eulogy that everyone loved her, everyone was her friend.

Drew and I may never see our grandmothers again once we move away. I promised mine real letters, on paper, with handwriting and postage stamps. Maybe I’ll load them up with pressed flowers and tiny packets of beach sand, or pictures of us with our hair damp with rain, grinning like tourists at the door of our home.

I hope she’ll collect a stack of those letters and tie them with a ribbon.

Do you still have a grandma? If not, do you remember yours?

Green

Here are a few pics from our trip, the view from the other side of the fence.

It’s greener. I’m just saying.

P.S. Mom, if you click on a photo, it will open a slide show. Use the arrow keys to navigate. Do not curse at the screen or imagine that the interwebs are conspiring against you. XO

The Secret Miracle Series – 3

Question number three, from The Secret Miracle: A Novelist’s Handbook:

DO YOU DO ANY RESEARCH BEFORE YOU BEGIN WRITING? IF SO, DO YOU FIND IT HELPFUL, OR DOES IT CONSTRAIN YOUR IMAGINATION?

Ducklings

Yesterday I had a talk with my daughter. She’s been on the fence about this relocation to Portland. Although she definitely wants to come with us for the move itself and spend a few weeks at the new house, she’s decided to attend the community college here in Vegas after she returns to town. All her friends are here, and she’s planning to get an apartment with a buddy of hers once she has a steady job. My oldest son will be staying here too, finishing his degree at UNLV. Ditto the roommate and steady job.

I know it’s important for my kids to choose their own paths and I completely respect their decisions. But leaving them behind is going to be awful. With the exception of a few weeks each summer, I’ve had these children tucked under my wing every single day of their lives. I’ve been able to hold them, laugh with them, snuffle in their warm little ears just to hear them squeal, Mom, stop tickling me! and feel the goosebumps rise across their smooth young skin. We’ve talked about boys and school and clothes, music, politics, religion and the lack thereof. They’re more than my children now, they are my friends. I’m going to miss them terribly. No matter that Vegas is teeming with family members who will look after them, I’m going to worry.

I sat each of them down and told them to call me if they need anything: money, food, someone to talk to, a plane ticket to Portland. (Is there an expiration date on that offer of money? my daughter wanted to know. Get it together by age 30, I told her. You’ve got time.) I explained my own suicidal depression at age 18, how the fear and loneliness almost did me in, how my parents had to walk me off the ledge. I described the many stupid mistakes I made at their age, and every one of them fixable.

Call me, I told them. Call me, call me anytime. For anything.

Still it feels like abandonment. Our roles are reversed and that’s my doing; I’m emptying the nest and taking it with me. What if they come untethered in the new life I’m forcing on them, on everyone. What if they come to harm? What if they resent me?

For comfort, I remind myself that I’ve stayed in Vegas all these years in order to give my kids a relationship with their father. Surely it should be okay to let go now and not feel as if I’m being selfish. Surely they know I love them.

Don’t they?

How do you leave the ones you love?

The Secret Miracle Series – 2

Question number two, from The Secret Miracle: A Novelist’s Handbook.

ARE THERE CERTAIN AUTHORS YOU WON’T READ FOR FEAR OF UNDUE INFLUENCE?

The Secret Miracle Series – 1

Saturday’s mail brought me a fabulous new book: The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook, edited by Daniel Alarcón, the proceeds of which are used to support 826 National’s numerous writing programs. The book contains a series of questions posed to a representative list of authors, including Michael Chabon, Amy Tan, Paul Auster, Tayari Jones, Jennifer Egan and Stephen King. Hearing all the different answers to questions about the craft of writing fascinates me, so I thought we might play along here for a while. I hope you’ll also pick up a copy for yourself, and read what the big bugs have to say.

The questions in the book are grouped into chapters. I’m going to choose my favorites and ask them verbatim, one per day until we run out or you get bored. I will let your answers stand in comments without any chatter from me. (You’re shocked to hear it, I can tell.)

Ready?

Here’s question number one:

WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A NOVEL?