I was browsing my bookshelf this morning, for no good reason, and noticed my beat up copy of Litmus, the literary and visual arts journal produced by the students at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities, where I studied my junior and senior years of high school — 20 years ago.
I’ve leafed through this journal a few times since then. It’s always so nostalgic. As I reread my classmates’ work, I’m brought back to the rooms where we met for workshop and critique, where we treated each other like Grown Up Authors and said lots of useful and painful and often just petty things, which is probably also what Grown Up Authors do. I really thought, at sixteen years old, that I’d write short stories and novels for the rest of my life.
Looking back at Litmus today, I reread my short story contribution, “Sad Poetry,” which is probably the best thing I wrote in high school. I submitted it to a national contest and won an award for it, which only cemented my vision of myself as a budding full time author — as silly as that seems now (it turns out winning awards in high school for creative writing does not correlate well to being a working author later in life).
Still, I’m proud of this story — I think it holds up — so I’m publishing it here for digital posterity.
Reading it again makes me wish I still had that young person’s ability to see the world primarily through personal experience, which I think often makes for better writing (certainly for fiction). By the time I got to college, I was so worn out from my intensive arts high school experience, I wanted to do something totally different. I signed up for computer science, economics, political theory, and Russian. I bit off more than I could chew there, and pretty quickly dropped computer science. It turns out we weren’t learning how to use Excel. We were learning the mathematical basis for computer languages. My brain was not ready.
I did stick with politics, though, graduating with a degree in Political Science, which given the courses I took was more like a degree in Political Sociology. And then I went to work in nonprofits, trying to make the world a better place (a grand endeavor that has only shrunk in scope and scale as I’ve gotten older and more realistic about one person’s ability to “change the world”).
I do still write, though, and in an odd way my writing work sits at the intersection of my creative writing roots and my political science studies — writing action alerts and appeals for nonprofits. This type of work speaks to all aspects of my personality and interests, which is great, but I do think looking at the world through academic, categorical, demographic, and theoretical lenses has made it damn near impossible for me to tap back into that youthful state of channeling the world just through my experience of it. Maybe I’ll get there again someday. It’s not the only way to write well, but it has its advantages, especially for fiction.
For now, here’s a glimpse into what my fiction voice might have sounded like, had I kept it going (lightly edited from the version published in Litmus to root out some fatphobic descriptions that didn’t add anything but fatphobia to the story and to correct some truly bizarre tense shifts I had going on back then).
Also, I just realized I’ve written the annoying recipe blog post here, where you ask the reader to wade through (or scroll by) paragraphs of rumination before you get to the recipe itself. For shame!
“Sad Poetry”
Jody Walker thought he was better than the other kids at school because his parents would never get divorced. He said he knew this because he found a really big book with Until Death Do Us Part and How to Make It Happen plastered across the front in pink bubble letters that looked like cotton candy. And he knew those words meant to stay married because he’d been to more weddings than Josephine, a red-headed girl in our class who had cherry cheeks and wore the same tie-dyed t-shirt to school every day. Jody said the preacher always mumbled about death before the bride and groom smiled and kissed and forced each other to eat cake.
Josephine’s cousins were all young and loose and wild and marrying like crazy, so she thought she was the authority on flower girls and diamond rings and often contested Jody’s knowledge of weddings. I told Jody that just because there was a book in somebody’s house about doing a thing didn’t mean that thing was ever going to get done. I told him my mom kept stacks of Reader’s Digest on the back of the toilet, but I’d never heard her complain about crapping out a fairytale. He said there weren’t any fairytales in Reader’s Digest, and I almost reminded him that he couldn’t read his own name, but the bell rang and I went to see the guidance counselor, Mrs. Sherman. I’d been writing sad poetry in Mrs. Carson’s class.
I first got into trouble over my sad poetry the day I opted to let my mother do the laundry. I’d always insisted on washing the clothes, even when I was so young that I first had to upturn the flimsy wicker basket onto the floor beside the washing machine so I could stand up tall and flip open the lid. We no longer had a laundry room of our own since Mom had packed up all of my sister’s stuff and my stuff in worn appliance boxes and said, “Your dad and me just need a little time.”
Mom said she hated our new apartment complex’s laundry mat because the walls were green like the jungle and the washers and dryers were green like phlegm. She felt like she was on the inside of a cucumber, and that laundry mats should be pretty and pastel. As she said this, I watched her fold a long-sleeve shirt the color of lemonade three times over. I didn’t know what pastel meant back then, but the only thing I’d ever thought was pretty, besides the snow angel I made one winter and gold stationary, was my mom’s long, peach-colored face. I didn’t think they could decorate a room with a face.
I was re-teaching my little sister Sara how to use the new remote control when Mom came back that day with a basket full of cold, wet clothes.
“We ran out of quarters?” I asked, as Sara went back and forth from My Two Dads to MTV’s tenth anniversary special. My little sister was five and loved Madonna. She ran around the apartment with nothing on but a pair of pink panties and Mom’s pink wind suit jacket — the closest outfit she could piece together to match the one Madonna wore in “Material Girl.” She sang the song into a pink mousse bottle.
Mom put down the clothes, which made a loud squish into the white carpet like rain shows in mud. There was a mushy piece of folded paper sticking out of her front pocket.
“You forget to check your pockets?” I asked. Mom scratched the inside of her nose with a purple fingernail the way she always did when Dad came home late from work and pretended like dinner wasn’t too cold to eat. I stared at the paper, squinted and saw familiar words blurred in pencil haze across the front. Mom had one of my poems from Mrs. Caron’s class in her pocket, it was Jody Walker’s fault and nobody else’s, and I knew it. I decided right then that I was going to kill him in every single way he said he never wanted to be killed. “Killer bees,” he said one time, “and Grandma’s big ugly kisses.”
I always kept poems in my blue notebook, the one Dad signed like an autograph the last time he got a raise because he said that raises were rare around the office.
“I’m a temporary movie star,” he said, and dotted the i’s in his name so fast the ink didn’t have time to dry before he smudged it.
I had even made a special request with Mrs. Carson that she let me turn the whole notebook in at one time. I hadn’t wanted to tear each poem out and risk someone like Jody getting his Cheeto-greasy fingers all over them, or Lacey Moore, who was in Ms. Bauer’s class. She was the only person in fifth grade with more Accelerated Reader points than me.
But the day before my mom did the fated load of laundry, the day she took me into my room for a conversation for the first time since the separation, Jody Walker had snatched my notebook away from me. I was copying “Hunger,” my latest poem, off of a McDonald’s napkin when Jody surprised me. He held the notebook over my head and hooted, stumbling through the words as a crowd gathered around us.
“Hunger is like an empty refrigerator.”
“Give it!” I yelled.
“It looks like cottage cheese.” Josephine laughed and spit grape juice all over the back of my neck. I wanted to hit her, but most of her cousins were boys.
“You look like cottage cheese,” someone ragged from a crowd of fourth grade girls who wore matching shoelaces.
“You!” I screamed back.
“It smells like blue plastic bags.”
“That’s mine!”
“It tastes like hose water.”
“Give it!” I yelled again and kicked him in the back of his knee. He started forward and I reached for the notebook, succeeding only in a two-finger pinch on the corner of the page I’d been writing on. I ripped it awkwardly, so that “unger is like an empty refrigerator,” and nothing looked like cottage cheese anymore.
Mrs. Carson shoved open the double doors, which the wind caught and slammed against the building. I folded up the paper and wedged it down into my tiny pocket before she could see it. She wanted my notebook. I knew she would take it. She had been asking for my poems for two weeks before then because — she told me in secret — she’d grown tired of “Love is like flowers, pink and red.”
Watching her stomp toward us, I imagined her snipping each poem out of the notebook with her curly-cut scissors, glue-sticking them to ugly, orange construction paper because our class’s state was Florida. I thought she would put them up on display at PTA meetings, tell the other moms how special I was and how unique — how much I reminded her of herself at my age. She always told me that in front of the class and it made me feel stupid, even though I didn’t refer to my classmates by animal names like she did — Kitty Kat and Kangaroo Kevin. I didn’t smell like her hair perm goop and gelled Crisco all the time either.
Mrs. Carson wanted my notebook because she had read one of my poems — “Loneliness” — and it was far better than the example she’d written on the blackboard the first day of class. And it didn’t help, I thought, that she loved the color blue. She wore blue jean skirts and blue eyeshadow, drank blue Kool-Aid until her lips were blue like fear, and always gave out blue stars instead of gold ones, which I thought would have made kids feel better than blue ones.
“Jody Walker, you hand me that notebook right now,” she said as she neared. “Right this very minute.”
“Give it to me,” I hissed, and Jody just laughed and held it in the hand I couldn’t reach.
“Teacher said she wants it,” he said and grinned, and I wanted to tell him to go brush his stupid yellow teeth. Mrs. Carson held her palm out. Jody slid the book slowly over her skin until the notebook could balance on her hand, at which point Mrs. Carson clamped her other hand down on top of my notebook like an alligator chops — like Pac Man eating a ghost.
“Thank you, Jody. Now run inside and finish recess against the tardy wall,” she said, running her fingers across the cover.
“But — ”
“March,” she said.
As Jody turned on his heels and lugged his body toward the building, I looked up at Mrs. Carson and said, “That’s my notebook.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, still running her fingers over the cover. She touched my dad’s signature and smiled.
“Mrs. Carson,” I said, as she waved me to silence.
“If this is what caused all the commotion,” she began,” don’t you think I ought to give it a look? We wouldn’t want something like this to happen again.”
“But I’m not finished with it,” I started. She waved her free hand toward the monkey bars, stuck her face up high and reminded the others that recess would be over in ten minutes.
“Exactly ten minutes!” she yelled, and walked back toward the building. I watched her turn the first few pages of “Jealousy” and “Sickness,” and I wanted to hit her too, but she was way bigger than me and the principal was her boss.
*
The night that Mom found the misplaced poem, she told me I was trying to get back at her for leaving Dad. The next day, when I went to see the guidance counselor, she told me to write about happy things like piglets and hope and world peace because that would make me feel better.
“If you stand out in the rain,” she said, “of course you’re going to get wet. If you stand out in the sunshine…”
You get burned and peel and itch and get skin cancer like Uncle Dale, I thought.
“Sickness is like sunshine,” I told her, and that was that.
*
Dad called a week after my visit to the guidance counselor. He’d been moving into his new apartment for a while and finally had it ready for Sara and me to come stay the weekend. Mom hadn’t let us help move his stuff out of our old house, even though I threw a fit because I knew I left a package of postcards, broken sand dollars, and other treasures from our family’s last beach trip.
“Instead of me picking you up,” Dad said, “why don’t you ask your mom to bring you guys to that pizza place Sara likes so much, so we can talk about a few things and eat like a family.” I couldn’t remember eating with my family like a family — the way Dad’s voice made it sound wholesome and important. I wasn’t even sure if we’d ever eaten close to how a family does, although I was sure I’d done it before at a friend’s house. We’d eaten spinach casserole and cooked carrots and his little brother had thrown up all over the high chair. They hadn’t let us turn on the TV, even after we finished eating.
I thought about telling Dad that Uncle Joey’s Pizza Palace, where Sara liked to go, didn’t make spinach casserole. Instead I told him I had to run because SNICK was coming on and I wanted to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? I told him I would call him back and I loved him too. I thought about asking Mom Dad’s question. I wrapped the phone cord around my middle finger until it turned purple like grape jelly.
“Nervousness is like a boat on water,” I thought. I wanted to write it down, but I still didn’t have my blue notebook, and Mom hadn’t shown any interest in getting it back for me. I’d asked a few times, but I could tell she still thought I was trying to punish her. She returned all of my observations with, “So what?” Later, she’d come and sit near me, looking everywhere but in my eyes as if she’d wanted to apologize for a bruise or cut she hadn’t intended.
She always retreated to her bedroom on Saturday nights after nine o’clock, when all the dishes were soaking and the kitchen floor was swept, the checkbook balanced. As a joke, I’d tried to balance the checkbook on my nose one time but it tipped over and paper cut my eyelid. I wore a black Band Aid like a pirate’s patch for three days, but because it wasn’t near Halloween, nobody thought it was cool.
Mom had said No and then Yes and then No again about dinner with Dad. She scratched the inside of her nose with a clear-coated fingernail. I didn’t want to look at her; I couldn’t imagine she wanted me looking either. I stared at her new bedspread instead, which was all flowers — hundreds of tiny rosebuds held captive by thousands of little white threads.
When she first got the bedspread, I told her it was exciting like car crashes. She looked at me as if I were trying to write a poem out loud so I shut my mouth and helped her smooth over the wrinkles.
I stood in the doorway after that final No. It had been my obvious cue to exit and check on Sara, but something about the air and light or both was warm and inviting. I felt permitted to stand. I watched my mom stare at herself in the mirror across the room, watched her pull a strand of thin, brown hair out of her eyes, draw one knee to her chest, and toss her head to the side like the woman in the picture she’d found with Dad — the one dangling from a piece of tape in the storage space behind the anniversary cards at the Publix where she stacked greeting cards part-time before she moved us out of our house.
I was there when it happened, helping her shop for Sara’s birthday party. She had only meant to pick up the card she’d set aside for Sara. I watched her pull back the display case to reveal the hidden storage space (a secret about greeting card aisles I loved to keep), shocked by the picture as if it were a spider dangling on the end of a thread. She snatched it from the tape, held it between her fingers so tight she left a thumbprint across Dad’s face. She turned to me, said to put the grocery basket down and get to the car.
We drove over to her friend Jennifer’s house, which was expensive and white and much nicer than our old house. I thought Jennifer was the saddest person because she and her husband were divorced. She never saw him afterwards, unless by chance, and then it was as if they had only met once, I heard her tell Mom once — as if they were chronic strangers who’d exchanged phone numbers after a minor accident or mourned lightly together the death of a mutual friend who’d never gotten around to introducing them.
“I don’t know if I want to thank her or kill her or both,” I heard Mom say. I was supposed to be watching TV, but I’d turned the volume down low enough to hear them in the kitchen over loud refrigerator noises and a frantic coffee pot.
“Maybe you should kill her first,” Jennifer said, and I think I heard laughter.
*
As I turned to leave the room the night Dad called with his question, Mom said, “When was the last time you and your sister had pizza?” Her eyelids were tight and trembling and wet like water at the edge of a tub. She looked lost and scared, like the kindergarten girls we made fun of on the first day of school when the fire alarm went off and they didn’t know what to do in case of an emergency.
I watched the tubs of my mom’s eyes overflow, as steady as water on a wall. I told her don’t cry, don’t cry, and that I was sorry and so was Dad even if he didn’t know he should have been. She smiled, wet-faced, and told me not to worry — to go on to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, I found a blue notebook, the exact same kind as the one my dad had autographed for me, except the position of the signature was slightly skewed, the i’s dotted precisely with dark blue ink. The curves of his name glimmered in the light from my window like they were still wet, and I didn’t want to touch them — to risk touching them.
I opened the notebook. The pages were lined, blank, white, and fresh like the sheets I used to wash and fold for Mom, when she and Dad had shared a bed. The heat rushed on, sending breakfast through the vent above me. I smelled the sizzle of grease and cold blueberries — like years before when my parents scrambled eggs together, when I caught Dad spreading muffin mix across Mom’s lips, kissing her until the toast and the bacon both caught fire.
