Choosing Disappointment

cooking with friends

It is Valentine’s Day, and I do something I’ve never done for a guy before. I cook dinner.

That morning I’d gone to a wedding in a friend’s living room, but I’d picked out my silky blouse and skirt less for that important occasion and more with the tactophobe in mind. Maybe if I looked nice enough and cooked well enough on Valentine’s Day, he’d kiss me.

I fixed lasagna. I’d made it once before with friends, but this was the first time for me to make anything like that on my own. It came out of the oven looking perfect.

The tactophobe arrives with red roses and chocolate. Perhaps he means them or they are obligatory. I am happy to see them nonetheless. We drink wine and I say little about A’s wedding. I don’t want him to think I’ve got wedding ideas of my own.

He says he’s impressed with my cooking and eats two large helpings. I am happy even though I’ve never cared about impressing a man with my cooking.

We watch television. Only romances are on. We sit on the sofa. He leans against the armrest and I sit leaning back against him, my back to his chest, his arms around my waist, and sometimes he rests his chin on my head. I have one hand on his knee. We sit this way through the entire movie and whatever else it is that comes on after. After midnight he says he should be going.

I walk him to the door and he says he will call me later in the afternoon. I nod. I can’t focus on what he is saying because I’m too busy wondering if I’m standing too close or too far, if I look approachable or desperate, if I look the least bit attractive and why he brought me roses.

“Goodnight,” he says, and walks away.

When you write a story or make art, how much should you depend on the opinion of someone else? If you believe the acceptance, must you believe the rejection. I’m often puzzled by authors who will accept an award as if it were about time the world recognized their greatness, but if anyone criticizes them, they dismiss that person as ignorant or clueless.

I prefer compliments and criticism that is specific. Vague responses leave me wondering and questioning every move I make.

Is there any specific criticism that has stuck with you over the years? Any particular words that zip about in your head as you try to create? Anything you have to smother to keep working?

What does dancing get you?

“What time is your final exam?” my roommate asks, poking my shoulder.

I open one eye. “Eight o’clock.”

“It’s 8:30,” she says.

I fly out of my top bunk after three hours of sleep. I pull on a sweater that is on the floor. My hair is matted and tangled. Sheets lines etch my face. I grab two pencils, shove on my tennis shoes without bothering with socks, and I run.

I run down six flights of stairs, down the sidewalk, and across the street. It is December in Indiana and the cold sears my insides. Pain stitches through my sides and I keep running until I reach the history building and have to kneel on the stairs until I can breathe.

I get to the third floor holding my side and fling open the doors. Everyone and their pencils stop. I realize then I’m making this screechy, wheezing sound. The professor looks up and waits for me to walk, bent sideways to his desk. He says nothing but hands me the exam.

I sit down and lean forward to rest my forehead on the desk. The guy who sits next to me waits until my breathing steadies and he says, “What the hell happened to you?”

You ever get that feeling that you are never going to get enough done? No matter if you write one word or one-hundred pages, do you think you could’ve written more (never mind better)? Or maybe you are happy that you got something, anything, done at all.

My art show is coming in April and I’m getting that exam week feeling. That feeling you get when you’re faced with an exam and you know you could’ve studied more. You could’ve worked harder instead of gone out dancing. What did dancing get you anyway?

Are you with him?

meeting the future mom-in-law's friends

“Would you like to dance?” he says.

I’m sitting in a country/western bar with my best friend, S., and my dad’s girlfriend. The man standing at our table is tall and lanky. He wears a plaid shirt, a wide silver belt buckle, dusty jeans, and cowboy boots. I assume he drives a pickup or a Grand Prix. He looks at least ten years older than my 22 year old self.

“Sure,” I said. My dad’s girlfriend thinks I never date. I suspect she is starting to think I have no interest in men, but she’s too nice to say. She nudges my best friend’s arm. “Well, would you look at that,” she says.

On the dance floor, the man holds my hand and puts his other hand on my waist. He’s a gentleman though and doesn’t stand too close. We make small talk and I glance over at the table and dad’s girlfriend and S. are whispering to each other and watching me.

The slow song ends. “One more dance?” he asks. I nod before I realize what the next song is. The song is Strokin’ by Clarence Carter, and my stomach drops and my face burns red. I think of walking of the dance floor, but neither do I want to look uptight. I can take a joke, right? I’m a modern girl, yes?

I look at dad’s girlfriend and S. They are laughing. Well, it is just a song. The man smiles at me, and I do what I’m best at–pretend I don’t notice anything.

When the song ends, the man says something to me, but I don’t listen. “Thanks, but I really need to sit down,” I say, more to the floor than to him, and walk away.

In real life I’ll do close to anything to avoid conflict, but obviously this doesn’t work in a story. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t stir up too much trouble between characters, putting disasters together and figuring out if all turns out well or otherwise. Sometimes I worry I haven’t caused my characters enough trouble, but I don’t want to go over the top.

Where is the top? How do you know you’ve taken the reader far enough?

*

In other news…I keep tweaking the fiction blog (go figure), and have added brief descriptions of the other novels I’ve written. Since I’m trying to decide which one to edit next, please consider leaving a comment about which one sounds the most intriguing. (If they all sound like train wrecks, please, like my son says, keep it in your brain.)

An Audience, a Prince, and a Dance Floor

1992

“This song,” the DJ says, “is dedicated to the lady in red in the middle of the dance floor.”

The Prince song begins, and I like Prince. I keep dancing. My friend C. laughs and points at me. “What?” I shout over the music.

“Red!” she says and swings herself around to the beat.

I look around and realize I’m the only girl on the dance floor wearing red. Get Off is the song. I stop dancing.

“That’s right. You,” the DJ says. “From the gentleman over here on the right.”

Several people on the floor look at me. I’m unsure what to do. I don’t want to see the guy who picked this song for me, but I can’t help it. The guy on the edge of the dance floor waves at me. He is muscular, tall, and black. His head in shaved. He has a huge smile.

I give him half a smile and turn my back on him in what I hope passes for a polite thanks, but no thanks. But it is hard to dance again. What kind of song is Get Off to dedicate to a girl? How am I supposed to react to that? The possibilities begin–He thinks I’m in this bar for a one-night stand but why would he think that because my outfit is not that wild and I’m even wearing flats with bows on them for crying out loud, but maybe he’s just clueless and the DJ picked the song and he’s a nice guy, but then again maybe he didn’t think at all and he doesn’t care how I react, like maybe it was a joke and I’m reading way too much into this and why is it that some girls can tell a guy like to drop dead but I couldn’t do that if my life depended on it, I mean, maybe I’m just not worldly enough and I ought to be complimented, but what if by ignoring him I’ve made him angry and he will he think I’m blowing him off because he’s black or will he think it is because of the song, and is this song really that bad…

C. leans in to me. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go.”

Once you know you have an audience, the work changes. I was dancing one way until that song and a different way after. How I wrote my first novel was different than how I wrote the last one. How I write here is different than how I wrote in my journal (more consistent for one thing).

How has having an audience changed your work?

Novels & Plans

A glimpse of the novel and the plan. Go to Lake Belle.

You Are Wasting Your Time

friends try palm reading to cheer me up after the tactophobe dumps me

“I like you,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, exasperated. He’d been trying for almost an hour to get me to agree to a date.

“I just do.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You don’t know me!”

He threw his arms up in the air. “I know I like you, and if you went out with me, I’d get to know you. Why do you think I wouldn’t?”

I didn’t how to answer him, and I looked away. “There’s no point in wasting your time.”

“I wouldn’t be wasting my time.”

“You think what you want. I’ve got to go.”

“Will you think about it?”

“Fine. I’ll think about it,” I said, knowing I’d never say yes.

Why do some us fail to believe in our writing? I send a piece out into the world and can think only about is how flawed it is. Looking over the pages, I see a tangled mess. They are tangles that defy logic. They can never be straightened out.

But if you don’t believe in your writing (or your art) but you keep putting down words, what does that mean? Are you crazy or do you harbor a faith in yourself that you just can’t admit to? Why ever not? What would be terrible about that?

Maybe that anxiety comes from somewhere else entirely. Do you think people are born with faith in their abilities and have it taken away? Or they born without it and have to learn it?

What happens next?

in a Bulgarian hotel

My traveling companion pretended to be asleep. I stared out the train window and ran over all the things I should say when he bothered to look at me and how I ought to say them. Perhaps he pretended long enough to really fall asleep, but he kept his eyes closed for two hours. Not that I turned to see him. If he once looked at me through half-closed lids, I missed it.

When the train pulled into our station, it was close to 10 pm. We didn’t mention the night before. He talked to me as if I were a casual acquaintance he happened to be traveling with. Months we’d been friends. I thought that if I were sophisticated, I wouldn’t feel phased.

This city was not our final destination, but we needed a place to stay. Another volunteer lived in this city, but we had no address and no phone number. J. wasn’t expecting us.

“You’ve been here before,” my traveling companion said. “Do you remember the way?”

I adjusted my backpack. “I was here once,” I said. “And now it’s dark.”

We decided we’d walk. We’d either find J.’s apartment in this city of 160,000 or spend the night walking. After a short while, the buildings thinned out to countryside. We turned around.

A while later we decided to rest and take a bus. The people were happy to see Americans and they welcomed us, gave us food, and sang. My traveling companion grinned, laughed, and shook hands. I tried to relax. I asked if anyone there knew the American teacher in their town. They’d heard of one, and argued over the name of his street.

We stayed on the bus until it was almost empty, and around 11:30 pm the driver dropped us off in a quiet neighborhood. “Here,” the driver said and shut the door.

“Which way?” he asked. I didn’t know.

“This way,” I said, and he followed me. We came to a broad busy street. It looked familiar and it didn’t. I turned left and wondered what we would say to each other if we walked all night long. But I’d gone the right way. A ten minute walk and there was J.’s apartment block. “I did it! I found it!” I laughed and my traveling companion laughed. “I knew you could,” he said. “I can always count on you.”

I tried not to read too much into that.

The lights didn’t work in the building’s stairwell. We had to feel our way up the stairs, our hands on the walls, tripping over steps. I couldn’t remember which floor J. lived on. I guessed the third and knocked.

The man who opened the door wasn’t J., but he got a flashlight and showed us to the second stairwell. J. was startled to see us, but happily let us in.

On the sofa, I couldn’t sleep. I listened to my traveling companion turning over on the floor. I should say something now, I thought, while it is dark and he can’t see my face. But then again, there was nothing to say.

When I finish a story, I think of a thousand excuses, reasons why this doesn’t work or that doesn’t work, what I’m sure needs changing and what is probably missing. But eventually, as I measure the sound of my voice and the desperation that it might give away, I bite my tongue. What needs to be said? The reader will like it or he won’t.

When I get to the end of the story, I’m so thrilled, and then I worry what happens next. How important is what happens next to you? If you are never published, how will you feel? What if the person you share your work with doesn’t like it? Do you think you pin too many hopes on a story that doesn’t work?

Clueless

friends

“You really don’t know?” my step-sister asked.

“How am I supposed to know anything? You were just gone,” I said. We sat in her room. The door was shut but we could hear her mother’s voice from my dad’s room. It wasn’t their bedroom. My step-mother slept in the bed next to the pool table on the other side of the house.

“God, you can be stupid,” she said. “Where do you think we went?”

I shrugged. We were 14. Our parents had married five years earlier, and every few months my step-mother and my step-sister disappeared. I’d come home from school and they’d be gone. A few months later they’d come back. I usually didn’t know where they went. I didn’t ask–asking questions was asking to be lied to.

Maybe the less we said her name, the less my dad would think about her.

“I don’t know where you went,” I said to my step-sister and wished I could surprise her with insider knowledge. She always knew more than me even though I got better grades.

She rolled her eyes. “She runs off with men,” she said, flinging her hair behind her shoulder. “Men she meets at the truck stop. We come back when the money runs out.”

I don’t know why this had never occurred to me.

I write a story or make a picture and am certain I am missing something. The work is not complete, but I can’t see what it needs. If read the right book or took the right class, I’d know. I’d have that insider knowledge.

What training or special knowledge do you think a writer or artists needs? Are you born with the sense of story or do you have to learn it?

In love? We have a form for that.

one cute couple and me--1992

“Are you in a relationship?” he asked. I didn’t think to lie. “Yes.” The tactophobe and I had been dating for only a few weeks. I was still filled with hope.

The question was part of my Peace Corps application process. As my recruiter explained–most people who quit their service early do so for a relationship. This cost the Peace Corps money.

The tactophobe had the same recruiter, and I thought this would work in my favor. “My boyfriend already has his invitation,” I said. “We’re okay with going to separate countries. It isn’t a problem.”

In truth, I could so rarely ever say I had a boyfriend that I couldn’t resist admitting to one now–even though perhaps he was no boyfriend at all.

“You’ll have to have him fill out a form,” the recruiter said.

“Excuse me?”

There was a form that I would have to give my boyfriend about our relationship. I started to protest, but shut my mouth. When I got the form with its five questions, I set it aside. There are pages and pages of forms to get into the Peace Corps. Maybe no one would notice if I failed to turn this one in.

Four months later my recruiter told me he had my medical forms (four visits to four different doctors), letters of reference (eight), personal essay, written answers to interview questions, actual interview, application form, financial documents, and transcripts, but he didn’t have that form.

I thought of telling him I had no future with my boyfriend, that it was just a thing, not a relationship, but what would that sound like? Did I want to sound like that for a guy who wouldn’t kiss me? And how could I admit that after five months, my boyfriend hadn’t kissed me? That wouldn’t do.

I dug out the form.

“Hey,” I said to the tactophobe, standing in his living room. “Could you fill this out for me?” I held out the form. “It’s stupid, but, you know, I can’t get my invitation without it.” Maybe he would think I was crazy. Maybe our relationship was all in my head. Maybe he would say, “What do you mean boyfriend?”

He took the form. “Oh this,” he said. “I should’ve warned you. You should’ve lied.”

“Yeah, well. What did I know?”

He sat on his sofa and scribbled some answers. I didn’t look at them when he handed the form back to me.

That night, alone in my own room, I pulled the form out of my purse. I skipped down to the last question–What are your future plans for this relationship? We have no plans to be together.

One day you will put your work out into the world and someone will look at what you’ve done, and he will shrug. All your friends and a few strangers will love what you do, but there will be someone who just doesn’t. This is not the end of the world. This is not a final judgment. But often we let the person stay in our thoughts and undo our confidence. Why do we give this person such power?

Is there one person you keep trying to please even when you know you never can? Does this soul deserve this power over you?

Or have you ever thought that you were that person? Have you seen someone trying to please you, and nothing that soul does reaches you? Do you try to explain it? Perhaps put it in writing?

Should I even say Happy Valentine’s Day at this point? ha.

Money and Knives

graduation day in Bulgaria

When I returned to America, I decided it was time to sell my mother’s things. Boxes of dishes, clothes, books, art supplies, papers, and odds and ends were piled and crammed in my bedroom in my father’s house.

The boxes had once gone from floor to ceiling with only a path to my bed kept clear. Over the years I’d rummaged through them, each time taking away a few things and a later a few more things. With each visit it got easier to remove another layer.

Now I was back after two years away and about to get married. What I couldn’t take with me to Texas would be sold.

Sitting on the floor, I struggled with what to sell things for. I made wild guesses. Fifty cents for a coffee mug and five dollars for a set of oil paints. Every few minutes I repeated what my mother often said, “Do you own it or does it own you?”

Among her things was a hunting knife in a leather sheath. I guessed her ex-boyfriend had given it to her. What do I know or care about knives?

One man who showed up to the yard sale was my dad’s mechanic and the husband of my step-mom’s friend. This man liked to lean in too close to any woman and he didn’t bath every day. Nor did he wear anything under his shorts. He liked to make excuses to visit my step-mother when my dad wasn’t home. She never let him in the house, and one day she suspected him of slashing her tire because she’d turned him away.

He bought the knife.

The night after my yard sale he called me. “Yes?” I said, making a point of saying neither hello nor how are you.

“That knife you sold me,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Well, I went and took it down to…”

I stopped listening. I wondered what I could say that my dad, if he overheard, wouldn’t think rude. Then I heard the man say, “$200.”

“What?” I asked.

“I sold it,” he said, “for $200. and made myself some money. What do you think of that?”

I thought he was an ass and I was an idiot. “That’s great,” I said. He began to talk again.

“I’ve really got to go,” I said, and hung up.

I’m still not good at putting prices on things. several people have told me how to figure out prices, and what they say makes perfect sense. Think about materials and labor and the marketplace.

The formula isn’t hard. Feeling I have a right to use the formula is another matter all together. I’m going to sell my art work at an art festival in April and I’m going to have to have prices. I’m going to have to sit there as if I expect it reasonable for someone to give me money for my art.

Why is dealing with money hard?

How do you deal with money and your art? How do you feel asking a price? If it doesn’t bother you, why not?