On Jan. 4, 2011, I had the privilege & honor of delivering the student address at the first-ever Fairfield University MFA graduation ceremony. The event took place on Enders Island, the idyllic locale of our twice-yearly residencies.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
FU-MFA GRADUATION ADDRESS
It is an honor to speak to you on behalf of my brothers and sisters in the inaugural graduating class of the Fairfield University Master of Fine Arts Program. While it’s tempting for me to take this opportunity to thank the many people here who have helped me personally over the past two years, as the representative of the entire Class of 2010 I simply want to extend our heartfelt thanks to Michael White and Elizabeth Hastings for their steady, wise, and good-humored stewardship of this program these past two years. We are proud to have been the first cohort of what is fast becoming, thanks to your hard work, one of the premier low-residency MFA programs in the country. Our thanks also goes out to everyone who has joined us here this evening—Fairfield University administration, MFA faculty, our fellow students, friends and loved ones.
I’m reminded on this august occasion of another, somewhat less grand graduation ceremony I attended last year at which a dozen prison inmates received their GED certificates. I don’t mean to insult anyone with the comparison—there’s a big difference between a bunch of convicted criminals and my fellow MFA grads—for one thing, a convicted criminal stands a better chance of getting a book published these days—but I keep thinking of something the featured speaker said at that ceremony. He was a local middle school principal, a kindly man who bravely challenged the tough, generously tattooed graduates with the same question his mother used to ask him whenever he’d accomplished something meaningful: “Okay, and what are you going to do now?” In anticipation of this evening, this question has haunted me ever since.
So what are we going to do now? No more program-imposed deadlines. No more supportive mentors awaiting our packets of stories, poems, essays. No more ten-day immersions at idyllic Enders Island. We’re on our own now in the hostile world of publishing and academia, where book contracts and teaching jobs are few and far between. We’ve all read the depressing articles about book stores closing, layoffs at publishing houses, universities cutting costs, and of course the end of serious literature as we know it.
With these depressing thoughts in mind, and searching for examples of literary triumph in the face of adversity, I have requested of our esteemed faculty samples of rejection letters they’ve received over the years. Here are some highlights:
Joan Connor received this one from a literary agent: “You are writing stories that look at life in a way that most people would prefer not to see.”
Here’s one from GRANTA: “Dear Nalini Jones, Your essay 'Food' is a delightful piece of writing, but I'm afraid it isn't for Granta. It's simply too essayistic for us. Best wishes…”
From The GEORGIA REVIEW: “Dear Nalini Jones, Thank you for allowing us to consider 'Names,' which we have decided to decline. We were more interested in the essay in the early going, when you appeared to be headed toward a focus on broader cultural matters, and less so when your family situation came to be the real center of attention. Our best to you in placing this work elsewhere.”
Rachel Basch, perhaps as some sort of purging ritual, was very generous with her rejection letters. An old one from an agent reads: "Dear Rachel, Thanks for your letter of the 1st and the two stories. I am pleased to see that you will be a creative writing student... I do not think you are ready for an agent, or (may I be so bold) for publication...."
Another agent, after showing “great interest” in the early chapters of Rachel’s first novel, had this to say upon reading the entire manuscript: "God knows, the last thing the world needs is another maternal jeopardy story."
Finally, having submitted her work to a short story contest, Rachel received this heavily Xeroxed form letter: “Thank you for letting us read your work. We read it closely & with interest; however, we were not able to use it for this year’s AMERICAN FICTION contest. Signed, Michael C. White, Editor.”
The delightfully jaded Sarah Manguso wrote me, “I've received the old-school rejection template more times than I can count, in which the piece has ‘made the rounds’ and ‘everyone loved it,’ but then the editor-in-chief is called by his first name and some production-related reason for rejection is cited. BURN!”
Several faculty members chose to tell uplifting stories about the hope they found in a hastily scrawled note of encouragement from an editor, or the vindication they felt when their work was finally accepted. Da Chen wrote to me in his unmistakable voice: “All you need is ONE person in this world to love your writing, and publish it, so that a million would get to read your books. Of six billions of earthlings, sooner or later, you will find that one...It's that simple. The Rule of ONE!”
Okay, so six billion to one are long odds, but still I like to think it can happen. So—and I address this to my fellow graduates—what are you going to do now?
What are you going to do when you wake up in the middle of the night asking yourself why you got this MFA degree when you could be two-thirds of the way through law school…
What are you going to do when your mother or your uncle or your own kids ask you when you’re going to wise up and do something useful…
What are you going to do when you get that 745th faded, heavily Xeroxed form letter rejecting the book you spent years writing and rewriting…
What are you going to do when that blank page stares back at you, taunting you with its vast white space until you go snow blind…
I’ll tell you what you’re going to do: you’re going to keep on writing. And you’re going to remember this:
In some civilized countries, parents actually want their kids to become poets; playwrights and novelists run for president (and sometimes win); and essayists affect public policy with their take on current events.
Remember this: there have always been storytellers, from the ones who drew pictures on the walls of caves to the blind man beside the campfire babbling on about the fall of Troy to the guy sitting across from you at Starbucks madly typing into his laptop.
Remember this: somebody has to tell the truth, whether it be in the form of a sonnet or a short story or a memoir or a screenplay--especially now, when words matter so much less than they used to, when whole countries are run by semi-literates, when elections are decided by lies and fear and ignorance. As author Rachel Kadish said, “This country…needs people who can connect words in a way that makes us feel we recognize the world around us, and don’t have to tilt our heads any longer to make the picture hang straight.”
Finally, remember this: though it feels like you are, you are not alone.
So, I ask you: what are you going to do now?
Keep on writing! That’s what.
What are you going to do now, Elizabeth Hilts?
Amanda Feuerberg? Tess Brown? Lindsey Ferarra? Steve Otfinoski? Christine Shaffer? Katie Schneider? Anne Hasenstab? Theresa Bruzese?
Cristina Morant? Tina DeMarco? Joe Carvalko? Jody Foote?
Pat O’Connor? Annabelle Moseley? Justin Scace? Lisa Calderone?
Mike DiCocco? Beth Hillson? David Fitzpatrick? Donna Woods Orazio?
Jane Sherman? Kelly Goodridge? Bonnie Cook? Chuck Johnson?
Keep on writing!
I’d like to close not with a quote from some literary giant—not James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway or Flannery O’Connor—but from an author whose work ethic and generosity toward his fellow writers is legendary. In his great book On Writing, Stephen King says, “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy…. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
Monday, April 26, 2010
INSIDE WORDS: Section One
SESSION ONE (10/14/09)
Garner Correctional Institution (GCI) sits on 118 wooded acres just a few miles from the quaint Main Street of Newtown, Connecticut. Approaching GCI from a narrow, tree-lined drive, I see first only the prison’s main entrance, constructed of reddish orange brick and elaborately criss-crossed by white arches and beams. The place looks as harmless as a community college until I drive closer and enter the visitors’ parking lot, where the view opens up to reveal two tall parallel chain-link fences crowned with razor wire.
I park and stare at the blank walls beyond the fences. I’m going in there, I remind myself.
In 1993, not long after GCI opened, two inmates escaped by cutting through these fences, but as I walk to the front door I can sense the fortification, the heaviness of the place—these outer walls look as though they could be ten feet thick—and I can’t imagine anyone getting out of here. All that’s missing is a moat filled with crocodiles. There’s not a soul in sight—not in the parking lot (though it’s full of cars and SUVs), not on the strip of grass beyond the fences. I take a deep breath, savor the sounds of birds and the wind rustling through the autumn leaves, and open the door.
Inside I hear only the low, dull hum of air conditioning. (Like a commercial airplane, the facility is sealed tight and thus requires canned air. The inescapable sound will be a recurring motif in the inmates’ writing.) Several rows of plastic benches line the lobby. I picture the seats on visitation day, filled with wives and mothers and girlfriends and children waiting to see their incarcerated men. I imagine their high-volume chatter as they trade tales of woe and injustice, their voices hardened, like their hearts, by too many hours spent on one side of the visiting table. But today the seats are empty, the lobby as quiet as a chapel. Straight ahead, a uniformed corrections officer (or CO—the term “guard” has long been out of use) sits behind a thick plate of glass. I tell him I’m here to teach a writing class in the prison library. He nods and picks up a telephone to call Mark Aldrich, the librarian.
“Someone will be down to escort you,” he says after hanging up.
I hand over my driver’s license in exchange for a small key. Along one wall are rows of lockers, the kind once found in train and bus stations. I stow my jacket, my wallet, my car keys. Like the men inside, I’m required to give up these personal items, and it feels wrong somehow, as if I’ve given up a small piece of myself. What’s it like, I wonder, to give up everything—your clothes, your money, your car, your home, your family, your right to vote, your dignity? It must be a little bit like dying.
While I wait for my escort, I take note of the signs posted on the walls:
Each visitor shall dress in a proper fashion with reasonable modesty. Revealing, seductive or offensive clothing that draws attention shall not be permitted.
Notice: One (1) visitor at a time in the rest room. See lobby officer for the key.
NOTICE: An inmate shall normally be allowed two (2) social visits each week, Monday through Friday, and one (1) on Saturday or Sunday every other weekend. No more than one (1) social visit shall be allowed for any inmate.
Fred Sgro, the prison school principal, arrives to escort me upstairs. Affable and nonchalant, Fred has about him the air of someone who has seen it all. He reminds me of character actor Jack Warden, who tended to play tough, volatile older men—harried husbands, hassled businessmen—in movies from the 1970s.
A week or so earlier, at our first meeting, Fred warned me against “winging it” as an instructor at GCI. “Other volunteers have tried that,” he said, “and the inmates can tell right away. They consider it disrespectful.” Respect, he told me, is the currency of prison life. He also advised me to dress well; shorts, an untucked shirt, a baseball cap will broadcast a lack of seriousness, and the inmates will take note and follow suit. At the same time, the prison volunteer training manual recommends we not dress too formally, in case the inmates get the idea that we’re wealthy. So today I’m wearing a freshly washed pair of khakis and a tucked-in, button-down shirt. This is the nicest I’ve looked in months, all for a bunch of drug dealers and rapists.
Fred waves me through a metal detector into an interior lobby area, where I hand over a second ID to another CO, who sits behind an even more heavily fortified wall of glass. He slides a visitor’s pass through a little drawer and buzzes us through a solid metal door into a small anteroom—a “sally port”—with doors at either end controlled by the CO. Neither door can be opened unless both doors are closed. The second door, the one leading into the inmate area, is large and constructed of heavy metal bars. It reminds me of the barred doors you see in banks, leading to the vaults. Once Fred and I are in the sally port, the CO presses a button and the barred door disengages from its lock, making a sound like metal cracking under tremendous pressure: CLANK! Fred and I step through the opening, and the door clangs shut behind us.
I’m in.
We climb a set of stairs and enter a long hallway that wouldn’t be out of place in a large high school, except that the small rooms we pass on the right—“We hold GED classes in there,” Fred explains—all have large plate glass windows so that the inmates can be visible from the hall at all times, like goldfish in a bowl.
An inmate approaches in a khaki-colored prison outfit—V-necked top, elastic-waist pants—that makes him look like a hospital worker in scrubs. My first thought is, What’s he in for? Is he dangerous? “Stay to the right,” Fred tells me, as if he were a driving instructor and the hallway a major city thoroughfare. Are there “traffic” rules here, too? I wonder. If I walk down the left side of the hallway, will the inmate challenge me? At the orientation meeting I attended a few weeks earlier, Mary Dunn, GCI’s volunteer coordinator, advised us to “always be a little scared.” Inmates are “keen judges of character,” she warned us, “and superb con artists.” According to the Volunteer Security Orientation Handbook, “Expect the unexpected… In several cases, volunteers have been hurt, victimized or murdered by inmates.” In the section titled “Hostage Situations,” we are advised “Don’t be a hero, wait for help.”
“Hello,” Fred says.
“Hey, Mr. Sgro,” the inmate replies with a smile.
A few more inmates pass us, each one saying hello to Fred. They’re black, white, Latino; some look tough, with hard faces and bulging biceps; some look like accountants. I expect them to check me out—Who’s this guy? What’s he doing here?—but they barely acknowledge me.
We turn left, passing a door leading onto a veranda. From the veranda a ramp leads down to a small walled-in courtyard, nicely manicured with grass and a few shrubs. This tiny oasis is for the staff only, Fred says, though inmates are allowed to mow the grass.
“Here we are,” Fred announces outside the prison library. I try to open the door myself, but it’s locked. Fred chuckles and produces a set of keys. All the doors are locked at Garner. Inmates must sign in and out, even to go to the bathroom.
The library is a more-or-less triangular room lined on one side by tall bookshelves and furnished with several large round tables and chairs. Along the near wall are low shelves and, above them, plate glass windows looking out into the hall. Another fishbowl. On the other side of the hall are more windows looking out on the courtyard. The natural light from these windows helps to counteract the harsh fluorescent ceiling lights.
A dozen or so inmates, in their identical uniforms, sit at the formica-topped tables. Mark Aldrich, the librarian, has recruited them over the past few weeks. Some are library regulars, some are in the grammar class Mark teaches, some are in a playwriting class. Today they’ve arranged themselves by race—the whites at one table, the Latinos at another, the African-Americans at two other tables. Some of the men nod at me, some stare off, others speak quietly among themselves.
I’m in prison, I keep telling myself, in a roomful of prisoners. I remember a made-for-TV movie I saw as a kid, The Glass House, a terrifying prison drama designed to scare the crap out of everyone. Male-on-male rape, drugs, gangs, sadistic guards—it had it all. Is that what life is like for these men?
“Welcome,” Mark says.
In his brightly colored sweaters, Mark has the bearing of a former priest—calm, patient, caring, but also skeptical enough that he can’t easily be bamboozled. He’s been here since 1996, and walks the two and a half miles to and from the prison every workday. A former volunteer director of community mural programs, he initiated the painting of the colorful mural of literary and movie figures—Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull, Braveheart, etc.—that brightens the cinderblock wall above the tall bookshelves. Mark is well liked by the inmates, in part because he does not behave like “management,” and treats them like real people rather than stereotypes.
“This is Mr. Belden,” he announces to the inmates. “He’s here to teach creative writing.”
And with that, I jump in, introducing myself as a writer and teacher and an MFA student. I explain that, while I’m here to satisfy a course requirement, I’ve also wanted for a very long time to teach in prison, and that I know from my own experience (as well as from others’) that writing can change your life. The inmates listen intently. I’m trying not to be unnerved by their laser-like eyes, knowing that, as Fred put it, they’re judging me—my words, my appearance, my reactions. Do I look frightened? God, I hope not.
Mark has handed out small, flimsy notebooks, and I make a mental note to bring in more sturdy ones next time. Still, I try to impress on them the importance of the notebooks—that they need to take care of them, that the notebooks belong to them, that they contain their words, their creations. Mark has also handed out pencils, which they’re required to turn in at the end of the workshop, though inmates are allowed writing utensils inside their cells (pens and pencils are considered potential weapons only outside their cells and the library).
A few have questions. Where do I go to school? How long will I be teaching here? The unspoken concern behind their questions is Are you going to keep coming back? From what Mark and Fred have told me, and according to accounts of prison writing classes I’ve read, inmates can be like children who require reassurance of your commitment to them. I tell them that I plan to continue teaching even after my MFA program requirement is satisfied, and that, as long as we’re all having a good time, I will keep coming back.
As the men speak, I refer to a list of their names and try to remember who’s who. At first I call them by their first names, which are easier to remember: Khalif, Brushawn, Hank. But at one point Mark slips me a hastily scrawled note: It’s better to refer to them as Mr. So-and-so. I nod, remembering how it’s all about respect.
Rather than have the men introduce themselves, I give them their first exercise.
“Write ten things about yourself,” I say. “But make one of those things a lie. When we’re done, we’ll read our lists out loud, and the class gets three chances to guess the lie.” They start writing before I even stop talking.
After ten minutes, everyone has finished. No one hesitates to read their work out loud. The lists are funny, revealing, and sometimes heartbreaking. Most of the lies are quickly uncovered—“Yo, holmes, you don’t love jazz!” “He ain’t no Jets fan!” “You’re Puerto Rican, not Dominican!”—because, as the men explain, they know each other so well that it’s hard to fool anyone.
Each list conveys important character information. Some men write ten simple factual sentences: “I was born in New Haven. I have five brothers and sisters, etc.” One writes a list of beliefs about himself: “I’m a good son. I’m a good father…” One forgoes a list in favor of a narrative, which throws off the others, who get caught up in the story and forget to look for the lie. By the time we’re done, they’ve loosened up a little, and I feel like I know them better than if they’d spoken extemporaneously about themselves.
*
THE INMATES
Mr. Carlin*: white, stocky, with a shaved head and multiple tattoos on his thick arms. A longtime inmate, he works in the library, and seems to have found a positive outlet through writing and reading. He smiles readily, a big toothy grin, but it’s not difficult to imagine him, in his younger days, being violent.
Mr. Thomas: African-American, thin, with intense, piercing eyes that show a combination of intelligence and anger. He’s the only inmate who has shared with me his crime—larceny (it comes up during a one-on-one discussion in which he expressed excitement about a big court case that might affect his own case).
Mr. Brown: African-American, tall, built like a refrigerator, with a large square head to match. An intimidating character, with a sarcastic sense of humor.
Mr. Mendoza: Latino, skinny, with cornbraids, a spark plug, tough on the outside but capable of very sensitive writing.
Mr. Lewis: African-American, wiry, with a gentle voice and shy smile. He seems out of place here.
Mr. Chandler: white, young, lost. At first this guy breaks my heart—he seems like he’ll never make it here—but as the weeks go by, he opens up and seems to find his place, and the other guys respect his intelligence.
Mr. Sherman: African-American, stocky, with tight cornbraids and a round face. He consistently comes up with insightful comments about others’ work. Drops out after a few weeks due to a new job in the prison laundry (returns for second term).
Mr. Gutierrez: Latino, tall, shaved head, a little older than most of the guys, with a tough exterior that softens when he puts on his reading glasses and shares his metaphor-laden stories.
Mr. Douglas: African-American, large but soft-spoken, very much a mama’s boy if his work is any indication. He contributes recipes to the prison newspaper. “Big D’s Jail Snacks and Meals” include S’mores and Spicy Nachos Supreme.
Mr. Jones: African-American, brawny, with two short, tightly wrapped braids that hang to the back of his neck, thick glasses. He speaks in a tough Brooklyn mumble and can be resistant and slightly combative, but in the end he becomes one of the workshop’s greatest cheerleaders.
Mr. Compson: white, burly, with shaved head and tattoos, plus a long, bushy country gentleman beard. He’d fit right in at a Hell’s Angels rally. A strong writer, but self-critical, afraid to let the creative side of him fly.
Mr. King: African-American, thin, bespectacled, with short-cropped hair. He’s unafraid to swing for the bleachers with his ambitious, philosophical stories.
Mr. Lake: African-American, with springy dreadlocks and a charming smile that contrasts with a slow, sandpapery speaking voice with an undertone of rage.
*
While the list of names includes each inmate’s prison numbers and which unit he lives on (each unit denoting the inmate’s security status), there is no way to know what crimes they committed to get here. They are discouraged from writing about their cases because many are still pending and anything they write could be used against them. Not that I’m anxious to find out. I can already tell that I will be getting close to these guys, and I don’t want our relationship colored by the knowledge of what terrible things they’ve done. Besides, as it says in the PEN prison workshop guide, Words Over Walls, “Never ask prisoners to write about the crime for which they are imprisoned, and do not inquire about it. Your business is to teach writing” (Jones, 19).
Next we spend a little time going over ground rules for the class. Basically, these consist of respecting each other and each other’s work. When someone is reading out loud, we’re to be quiet. When we discuss the work, we are to be positive and constructive. (In this case I follow the guidelines imposed by the New York Writers Coalition, for which I once volunteered. The people we were working with, much like these inmates, were either new to writing or had very little experience with criticism, and because our mission was not to turn them into brilliant writers but to simply encourage self-expression, we stressed only the positive.)
I also bring up ground rules imposed by the prison administration: no profanity, and no writing or discussion of violent acts. The profanity rule surprised me when Mark and Fred told me about it at our initial meeting. In Mark Salzman’s True Notebooks, the incarcerated teenagers the author works with are not prohibited from using “cuss words.” I asked Mark and Fred whether the inmates could write profanity in their exercises, so long as we edit it for publication in the prison newspaper or literary magazine. No, they said. Profanity is not allowed at all. This disappointed me at first; then I realized this kind of limitation can be advantageous—the inmates will have to be creative and find alternative ways to say what they mean.
With 20 minutes left in the two-and-a-half-hour session. I speak a bit about the five senses and ask the men how they would describe the library in a story: what does it sound like (the constant whir of the air conditioner, to one inmate, is like the sound of the ocean); what does it smell like (“old carpet,” “decaying books,” “the inmate next to me”); feel like (the tables are hard and smooth); what is the light like (harsh)? I talk about writing as a series of choices, and how those choices reflect the mood and feeling, so that someone feeling happy would describe the library differently than would someone feeling sad or angry.
Then I assign them an exercise to do on their own over the next two weeks: to describe the room they wake up in every day. Some of the men laugh.
“The rooms here are all the same!”
“Exactly,” I say, and they immediately understand how this will make the exercise interesting: despite living in identical cells, each man will write something different. Taking up the concept of mood, Mr. Sherman insightfully comments that a man would describe his cell differently on the day he was to be released than he would on his first day inside.
Mr. Thomas raises his hand. He wants me to know that, despite the inmates’ laughter, this exercise is not a joke. “Have you ever been in prison?” he asks. I tell him that I have not. “Then you can’t possibly know what it’s like to be here,” he says, “what it’s like to wake up in one of these cells.” His eyes bore in on me. “I just want you to know that this is no small thing you’re asking us to do.”
This guy frightens me, and at the same time I love what he is saying, the truth of it, the power. Of course he’s right; I don’t know what it’s like to wake up in a prison cell, and will hopefully never know. Hard pressed for a response, I thank him for his comment and assure him that I understand where he’s coming from. Later on I’ll wish that I’d had the presence of mind to respond with something profound and meaningful—the first of many such times. In this case, I could have told Mr. Thomas that it’s his job as a writer to somehow show me what it’s like to wake up on the inside, to make me feel, through detail and mood and metaphor, as if I were waking up in that cell myself.
When the session has ended, a few of the inmates approach me individually and ask me questions. Mr. Carlin wants to know about MFA programs and whether, upon his release, he would have a chance of being accepted. I take in his shaved head and the elaborate tattoos adorning his thick arms. He certainly doesn’t resemble the typical MFA candidate, but I assure him that if his writing is good, a school will want him.
Before being escorted out, I shake hands with Mark and ask him how he thinks it went. He’s happy, he says. I’d structured the class well, unlike a previous volunteer who traipsed in unprepared, wearing shorts and inviting debate on controversial topics that had the inmates practically throwing punches at one another. “The first rule of teaching in prison,” Mark says, “is to know your audience.” Then he says he’s going to invite the warden to stop by and observe, which I interpret as a thumbs-up for my performance.
On the way out, I feel like I’ve made a good start. I want to do better with the men’s names, and I wonder how many will come back next time (and the time after that), but they were engaged and their writing was good. When the barred door slams shut behind me this time, it doesn’t sound quite so loud.
*
In True Notebooks, Mark Salzman chronicles his experience as a volunteer creative writing teacher at Los Angeles’s Juvenile Hall. He is candid about his initial fear and skepticism, and even includes a list of his reasons not to teach the class (“Students all gangbangers; feel unqualified to evaluate poems about AK-47s… Still angry about having my apartment robbed in 1987” [9]), and yet the inmates seem to take to him immediately. Fred Sgro warned me not to wing it, and yet that’s exactly what Salzman appears to be doing. He has no organized plan or curriculum, no detailed map to get his students from here (resistant, lacking in craft) to there (eager, skilled writers). His first “exercise” is to “Write what’s on your mind,” and the inmates dive right in and produce impressive pieces. What was Salzman’s secret? How did he so quickly establish trust? Perhaps the kids responded to his Zen attitude, a calm core that may be a result of his years studying classical music and martial arts. (Did he leave out the part where he told his gangbanger students, “Don’t mess with me—I studied kung fu with Pan Qingfu!”?) Or maybe the inmates were so eager to express themselves that they were willing to trust almost anyone who gave them the opportunity. Probably all these elements were at play, as well as Salzman’s apparent lack of judgment. He doesn’t ask why these boys are in jail; he does not dwell on the mistakes they made to get there. He treats them like students who are there to write, and when they bring up their bad choices, he does not blame. Eventually, he comes up with this very simple teaching philosophy: “I’m trying to build their confidence by giving them topics they want to write about” (Salzman, 127).
A good portion of this paper will be devoted to my struggle to come to terms with the questions What is my goal in this writing class? and How will I achieve that goal?
On the one hand, I want to provide the inmates with the basic knowledge of craft and technique—the difference between first-person and third-person point of view, for example—so that they will become more conscious about the choices they make while writing. But I wonder if I can also, by encouraging the inmates to express themselves through writing, increase their self-confidence and contentment, which will help to facilitate their productive return to “the streets.” Is that a realistic goal? Can helping inmates to write better somehow turn them into better citizens? In his essay “A Hive of Mysterious Danger,” Joseph Murtagh, an English teacher at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York, writes of prison education in general: “Stuck away in a cell you will never act as anything other than a person stuck away in a cell, but in a classroom you can at least act like a student, which in turn might lead to acting like a citizen” (Murtagh, 75).
Susan Casey, a social worker who has taught creative writing to incarcerated adolescent girls in Portland, Maine, has championed “therapeutic” writing as a way to increase the inmates’ self-worth and well-being. By using Positive Psychology techniques—e.g., having the girls write stories about themselves using “positive emotion words” (one exercise is to “Write about your best possible future event”)—she finds that the inmates begin to “think beyond their problems and envision themselves having, and being more in, their future” (interview).
Similarly, in her essay “Imprisoned Mothers and Sisters,” Judith Scheffer observes that inmates who write “grow beyond individual pain as they develop both their writing craft and their personal coping resources by sharing their stories in writing workshops” (Scheffer, 120). “Whether achieved in the isolation of a cell,” Scheffer continues, “or within the community of an established writing workshop, writing has the power to change lives, if not circumstances, within the confines of prison” (124). In I’ll Fly Away, Wally Lamb writes eloquently about the inmates in his writing workshop at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution:
Within the confines of the prison, their writing began to give them wings with which to hover above the confounding maze of their lives, and from that perspective they began to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. (5)
Coming at it from the other angle, Eldridge Cleaver, in his classic collection of prison-penned essays, Soul on Ice, recounts his road to reform after a brutally violent career as a rapist:
After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray… I lost my self-respect. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself. (15)
Can I construct a rough curriculum—a simple road map that can be deviated from when necessary—that will help “save” prison inmates?
Mark Salzman, while actively trying to increase his students’ confidence, does not have such lofty ambitions. Asked if he has a way of measuring improvement in the self-worth of his students, he responded, “I wouldn’t know how to measure that. I don’t even know how to measure my own” (interview).
Monday, December 7, 2009
CRAFT ESSAY #14 -- Wuthering Heights
Description
The titular dwelling is described by the novel’s main narrator, Mr. Lockwood, in a few short paragraphs on page 5 (Signet Classic edition). It is this brief portrait that we mentally return to each time Lockwood or his co-narrator Nelly Dean approaches the estate. We see “the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house”; the “range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving the alms of the sun”; “the narrow windows…deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with their large jutting stones.” There are “grotesque carvings lavished over the front,” including “crumbling griffins and shameless little boys.” Inside, in the kitchen, where so much action takes place (as in most homes), we see above the chimney
sundry villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of ornament, three gaudily painted canisters disposed along its ledge. The floor was of smooth, white stone; the chairs high-backed, primitive structures, painted green; one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade. In an arch under the dresser reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer, surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and other dogs haunted other recesses.
This is an adjectival goldmine: excessive, stunted, gaunt, narrow, jutting, grotesque, crumbling, shameless, villainous, primitive, haunted. The dark toxicity is so unforgettable that Bronte need not mention more than the minutest additional detail in subsequent scenes.
In addition to its brutal setting, Wuthering Heights of course brings to mind the brooding, primitive hero, Heathcliff, and the willful, beautiful Catherine. Again, Bronte employs maximally evocative description of these characters in minimal time. Upon first meeting him, Mr. Lockwood sketches Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman…rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose” (pp. 5-6). Here we have the contradictory nature of the man: dark-skinned gypsy/gentleman, erect and handsome/slovenly and morose. This is the mature Heathcliff, the bitter man haunted by his lost love. But here is the young Heathcliff as introduced by the maid, Nelly Dean, on page 35:
A dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough both to walk and talk; indeed its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.
Note the word “it,” as if the boy were a dog, indicating both Heathcliff’s “otherness” and the cruel attitude of even the most charitable around him. Contrast this with Nelly’s take on Catherine:
Her spirits were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was—but she had the bonniest eye, and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish. (p. 40)
After Catherine’s five-week stay at Thrushcross Grange, during which the wild lass has been tamed by the civilizing influence of the Linton family, Nelly describes her as “a very dignified person, with brown ringlets falling from the cover of a feathered beaver, and a long cloth habit, which she was obliged to hold up with both hands that she might sail in” (p. 50). Heathcliff, on the other hand, has spent those five weeks toiling at Wuthering Heights and pining for Catherine: “his thick, uncombed hair, the surface of his face and hands…dismally beclouded” (p. 50).
Lesser characters are just as vividly portrayed. Here is Catherine’s cruel, widowed brother, Hindley, described by Heathcliff’s wife, Isabella, in a letter to Nelly:
A tall, gaunt man, without a neckerchief, and otherwise extremely slovenly; his features were lost in masses of shaggy hair that hung on his shoulders; and his eyes, too, were like a ghostly Catherine’s, with all their beauty annihilated. (p. 133).
The comparison of Hindley’s eyes to his sister’s is especially heartbreaking, and brings humanity to an otherwise unlikable character.
These precise, psychologically astute descriptions of character and setting, while brief, are just as integral as action and dialogue to the power of Wuthering Heights.
CRAFT ESSAY #13 -- A Map of the World
Dread
When describing Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, one is likely to say that it begins with the accidental drowning of a child. In fact, the drowning does not arrive until page 19. The retrospective impression that two-year-old Lizzy Collins dies on page one is due, at least in part, to Hamilton’s skill at building a sense of dread right from the opening sentence: “I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident” (p. 3). The narrator, Alice Goodwin, amps up the foreboding even more in paragraph two: “I opened my eyes on a Monday morning in June last summer and I heard, somewhere far off, a siren belting out calamity.” A siren is never a good sign, particularly when it is paired with a word like “calamity.”
On the next page the author continues the use of ominous language to prepare us for the tragedy to come:
The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves. (p. 4)
Notice the words: burned out, fierce, dirges, slaves, and the repetition of no. This is immediately followed by a description of “the jewel of the Goodwin property,” the pond where poor little Lizzy will soon drown. We don’t know yet that something awful will happen there, but the narrator’s palpable sense of irony about the pond (“I often had the fanciful thought that the pond would save us”) and its supposed innocuous qualities (“There were no leeches, no film or scum or snapping turtles, no monstrous vestiges from the Cretaceous Age lurking in the depths”) lends the pond a dark power.
Not content with building a sense of dread through description, Hamilton fashions characters and dialogue that ooze portent. On page 5, Alice’s three-year-old daughter, Claire, “banged her spoon on the table and announced, ‘I’m going to die when you do.’” (This declaration also serves to misdirect the reader, since it’s not Claire who drowns but her friend, Lizzy.) The tension escalates even more as Claire’s five-year-old sister, Emma, acts up at breakfast, testing Alice’s patience. In this scene, we get our first inkling that Alice is, at the very least, overwhelmed by the challenges of motherhood, and at most, too unstable to withstand the trauma we sense is on the way. When she notes that “Outside, the air smelled as if it had been cooked, as if it had been altered by the heat and was no longer life sustaining” (p. 8), we begin to understand that all the dread she is establishing has as much to do with her fragile state of mind as it does with the awful events to come. (Howard, her husband, later points out Alice’s tendency to exaggerate, a harmless habit that suddenly seems much less benign given the bizarre accusations leveled at her.)
After a several-page section of exposition, during which Alice skillfully paints an unflattering portrait of the townspeople who will eventually turn on her, she returns to that fateful Monday morning. First, Lizzy and her sister, Audrey, are dropped off by their mother, Theresa, who is Alice’s only friend (that Alice has only one real pal further hints at her unsettling “otherness”). Alice then lays out her plan for the morning, an idyllic jaunt to the pond with the four girls, composed in the conditional tense. “I would walk down the lane,” she begins, and then proceeds to pollute the whole tranquil enterprise with one simple, sarcastic sentence that screams DOOM: “The simplest thing in the world” (p. 16).
Next, Alice puts the milk away and retrieves some butter from the freezer, perfunctory details that, in this context, nevertheless carry portent. While searching for her bathing suit, she’s distracted by the map of the world she made as a kid, which she finds buried in a drawer. While she rhapsodizes about the map and her active childhood imagination, we’re thinking, “Uh-oh—what’s going on with the four very young children on their own downstairs?” Sure enough, once Alice finally puts the map away and locates her swimsuit, she comes down to find only three of the kids in the living room. Still, it’s several more paragraphs before she wonders, “Where’s Lizzy?” and even then she pauses to pull a hanging thread from her shorts (“It was tickling my calf” p. 18). Her cluelessness, combined with the carefully constructed suspense, creates even more tension in the reader. Finally, Alice searches for Lizzy and, seeing the wide open screen door, her feet feel “like two flabby erasers” (p. 19). At last! So she runs outside “like a blind person, stumbling over my own heavy limbs,” until she comes to the pond:
When I came to the clearing I couldn’t see past the single glaring point of sunlight, dancing on the water. I put my hand on my forehead, to make a visor, and still it took me a minute to find the pink seersucker bottom just beneath the surface, about fifteen feet from the beach.
This odd description of a drowned child—just a “pink seersucker bottom”—is startling in its emotional distance. Alice then takes a step even further back, framing her subsequent actions (running into the pond, attempting resuscitation) with this introduction: “When I am forced to see those ten minutes as they actually were…”
Why this distancing? Throughout the novel, Alice and Howard regularly speak of these events having occurred “last summer,” which places their current vantage point somewhere in the following year. Past-tense novels do not typically specify how long ago the action took place, so Hamilton does this for a reason. Perhaps concretizing the time difference allows her narrators, especially Alice—and especially Alice at this traumatic juncture—the specific distance necessary for tolerating the powerful emotions involved. And yet the emotions shine through, as does the dread that permeates those first 18 pages, so that the reader, looking back, sees the drowning as inevitable.
49 LOVE LANE -- Section 9
Chapter 15: The Finger
That evening, perhaps weakened by my hangover, I set out to tell Abby everything—that I’d been fired, that I’d been lying, that I had no prospects for another job. That I was a loser, basically.
I decided on this course of action while in the basement attempting to open that damn pentagram box. I poked it with a screwdriver, trying to find a hinge. I banged it with a hammer. I tossed it onto the cement floor and stomped on it. If I’d had a saw, I’d have cut it in half. I resolved to buy one next time I went into town.
Meanwhile, Abby remained upstairs with Daisy, playing games and reading books. Earlier, while the baby slept, and fed up with the woodpecker, she’d gone out into the yard.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Taking care of that damn bird,” she said as she twisted the outdoor spigot.
“Frannie said to use tin foil.”
“Screw that.” She dragged the green hose around the corner of the house and took aim. She pressed the handle on the hose gun and water splashed against the clapboards. The woodpecker squawked and flew into the upper reaches of a tall maple.
“He’ll be back,” Abby said. “We just need to keep spraying him till he gets the message.” Then she turned off the hose and marched back into the house.
As I banged once more on the pentagram box in the basement I still didn’t know what to make of her claim that she’d never seen the box before. I supposed Monica could have left it under the crib, but she’d half convinced me about the doll and I couldn’t come up with any logical reason why she’d leave these things in our home. Which meant that either Abby was lying or someone else had gotten into the house without our knowledge.
I set the box down and held onto the edge of the workbench. All afternoon I’d been suffering from dizzy spells—part hangover, part lack of food. I had no appetite and the thought of water still sickened me. The sweat on my face felt sooty in the dark basement.
Perhaps it would be best, I thought, if I just left. Abby could keep the house, find a job at a local law firm. I’d rent an apartment nearby, work at a bookstore. Everyone would be better off.
I went upstairs, resolved to tell her the truth. She sat on the sofa with Daisy, reading.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, closing the book.
“What do you mean?” For some reason I thought she wanted to sell the house, leave town. I was ready to say, Yes!
“Let’s go for a walk or something,” she said. “I’m going stir crazy.”
By the time she fed Daisy and got her settled into the stroller, with her doll nestled in her arms, the sun had descended to just above the far hills. At some point along this walk, I told myself, I would spill the beans. Perhaps it would be better this way—outdoors, in semi-public, where she couldn’t throw a lamp at my head.
We walked down the hill toward the lake. The sun seemed to be melting, like molten steel, across the top of the hills. Directly overhead one dark cloud swam slowly across the sky like a whale.
“The weather’s nice, anyway,” Abby said.
What did that mean—“anyway”? Was everything else about the day a disaster? Just wait, I wanted to say. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
We turned right at the bottom of the hill. The algae sat thick and greenish brown on top of the lake water. Abby tisked, as usual. I waited for the complaint, the curse directed at the realtor—or at me, for bringing her up here. But she said nothing. I had to skip to keep up with her, she was moving so quickly. The wheels on the stroller squeaked.
We walked like this for a while, with me hustling to stay abreast, Abby silent, Daisy gurgling in her stroller. By the time we reached the other side of the lake, the sky had purpled, and lights were switching on inside houses along the road.
Music blared from Charlie’s place. Lights flashed through drawn curtains, and cars jammed the driveway and lined the road.. Abby slowed as we passed, as if tempted to stop and go inside. I smiled, thinking of it: Abby chatting away with Charlie, the two of them sharing a bong. I considered telling her that Arnie’s pot dealer lived here, but I didn’t want to antagonize her—not when I was poised to reveal something that would really make her angry. So I said nothing, and we continued on.
We came to an especially murky stretch of road, flanked on one side by a field of huge, old maples that blocked out the sky, and on the other side an expansive lawn leading up to a dark, empty house. I rehearsed, in my mind, what I planned to say: Abby, there’s something I have to tell you. This would stop her in her tracks. She’d expect another confession of infidelity. I’d have to move on from there quickly. It’s about my job, I’d say, and she would be relieved that this was not about another woman.
As we approached the bend in the road—a sharp left beneath the canopy of trees—I could hear the rapid approach of a vehicle, its stereo turned up loud. Headlights pierced the trees. It looked like a pick-up, moving fast. Abby pushed the stroller to the side of the narrow road, which was lined by a three-foot high stone wall.
I coughed, like I always do when I’m preparing to say something, my throat tightening.
“Abby,” I said, just as the truck roared around the bend, nearly running us over. In the split second during which the truck passed by, a mere foot or two away, I saw into the cab, where two young men flanked a pretty girl with red hair. There was something especially infuriating about this trio, above and beyond their carelessness and lousy driving, and before I could think about what I was doing, I lifted my middle finger. Even within that crowded fraction of a second, I could tell that my gesture had registered. Then the truck was past us.
“Jesus!” Abby cried, leaning on the stone wall. The stroller had nearly tipped over. Inside, Daisy wailed.
I took hold of Abby’s arm. “Are you okay?”
“They could’ve killed us!”
She righted the stroller and dusted herself off. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said, leaning into the stroller and stroking the baby’s hair.
I looked back to see the pick-up slow to a crawl, then stop, about fifty yards behind us. The stereo had been turned off.
“Idiots,” Abby said as she pushed the stroller around the bend. She didn’t seem to notice that the truck had stopped. I glanced back again. The brake lights glowed red in the darkness. What if the driver backed up, or turned around? They were probably headed to Charlie’s house. Maybe they were drunk and looking for a fight. They might even have a gun in that truck.
Daisy was still crying. “Shhh,” Abby said, rocking the stroller as she pushed. I could still hear the growl of the idling truck. I considered telling Abby that we may be in some danger, but then I’d have to tell her about my obscene gesture, and she would berate me for being so immature.
“So, what were you going to say?” she asked as we rounded the bend.
“Hmm?”
The truck rumbled, but it seemed quieter. Had they moved on, or was it just that there was now more distance between us?
“Before that asshole drove by,” she said. “You were about to say something.”
What little courage I’d possessed earlier had left me. All I could think about was the truck. I could still hear the engine. I decided they had not moved on.
“Carl?”
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
She stopped and cocked her head. “I hear a car.”
What were they doing back there in the truck? Were they debating their course of action—one boy wanting to go back and kick some ass, the other anxious to get to the party, with the girl torn between the two?
The engine roared.
“Must be another truck,” Abby said.
“Quiet!” I held up the palm of my hand. The truck, still back behind the bend, was moving toward us. The headlights shone through the trees.
“Carl? What is it?”
In the dark I could make out a long driveway stretching toward a house in the woods.
“Go up that driveway there,” I said.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it, Abby.”
The truck came around the bend in the road. In a second or two the headlights would shine in our eyes.
“Please,” I said. “Just go up there and wait.”
She could see the truck now. From her eyes I could tell she’d made the connection.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Just go. Now!”
As if propelled by the force of my voice, Abby pushed the stroller up the driveway. Within a few seconds they were swallowed by the darkness.
The truck had reached the straightaway now, its bright beams illuminating the space between us. It was too late now to follow Abby.
I stood by the side of the road, shading my eyes against the headlights. All the effects of my hangover were now gone. The truck slowed, then braked to a stop ten yards away. The driver turned off the engine, leaving the lights on. The night sounds fell into place as if into perfectly carved slots: crickets, rustling leaves, the far-off barking of a dog.
I could not see inside the truck. The occupants remained perfectly quiet. The tip of a cigarette glowed.
From behind me came the sound of Daisy crying. Could the kids in the truck hear her? Shut up, I muttered under my breath. Shut up. It sounded so loud, the baby’s howls and gulps of air ricocheting off the trees. Tell her to stop, I wanted to yell at Abby. Put your fucking hand over her mouth.
Then, silence.
I’ve read stories by people who have been in dangerous situations—mountain climbers, police officers, combat veterans—and they speak of a sharp clarity that came to them in the midst of crisis. Their lives came into focus, their priorities re-arranged themselves logically, they were suddenly wiser. But for me, while that truck sat there, its headlights blinding me, my thoughts scrambled so that I hardly knew which way was up. I did not think of my job, my house, my family. My future did not lay itself out for me like a clearly marked road. My mind went blank, as if whited out by the glare of the headlights. I thought of nothing.
After a while—a minute? An hour?—the girl in the truck giggled. Then a male voice said, “I’m bored.”
The engine bellowed to life, gears screeched as the truck rolled backwards. The driver angled it sideways, then turned around. Still blinded by the glare, I could barely make out the three passengers. A beer bottle shattered at my feet. The girl laughed again and the truck tore off, blue exhaust clouding the retreating red taillights.
Abby appeared beside me. “Are you alright?”
I watched the truck’s tail lights round the bend and fade into the woods, the engine now a far-off purr.
“What were they doing?” Abby asked. “Why did they come back like that?”
“I don’t know.”
She grabbed my arm. “Well, why would they do that? They must have had a reason.”
“I don’t know, Abby.”
“I mean, who does that?”
“They were probably drunk.”
The night was quiet again. She moved closer and put an arm around me. I could barely see her.
“You should’ve hidden, too. They could’ve hurt you.”
She was right, of course. I suddenly felt very stupid for standing there like that, an easy target. They might have tried to run me down. Or shoot me.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
*
Later, lying in bed alone while Abby brushed her hair in the bathroom, I still considered telling her about my job. Maybe if I told her now, I reasoned, she would put the news into a larger context—what was losing a job, after all, compared to the possibility of getting killed or maimed by some drunk redneck punks?
Then she flounced into the room wearing nothing but panties and crawled across the bed.
“Hey,” she said, pausing in front of me, on hands and knees.
“Hello.”
“You like?”
Her breasts, plump with milk, dangled between her arms. I remembered how I used to enjoy touching them, kissing them, rolling my tongue across the tough little nipples. Since Daisy’s birth, however, they had transformed from erotic stimulants to a pair of practical glands designed for the dispensation of nutrients to our infant.
“I like.”
A cool breeze blew in through the windows, fluffing the thin cotton sheet. Abby reached underneath and rubbed the front of my boxers.
“You were very brave tonight,” she said, peeling off her panties with her other hand.
So much for confessing my bad news to her tonight.
“Shut out the light,” I said, nodding toward the lamp on her bedside table.
“Uh-uh.”
“Abby.”
“I want to see everything.”
I glanced over at the window. We still had not bought shades, one of many purchases we’d decided to put off until the paychecks started arriving. The night was black, but I knew that anyone who happened to be out in the yard next door—Frannie, Arnie, Monica, Ellis—could easily see into the lit bedroom.
“Let them watch if they want to,” Abby said, leaning in to nibble on my ear. She pushed her hand under the elastic of my shorts. “Mmmm. The dragon wakes from its slumber.”
She yanked the sheet off and straddled me. All I could think about was how Monica Johnston, perhaps out in her darkened yard to smoke an illicit cigarette, could now be watching my wife’s bony ass as she ground her crotch against me.
With this image in mind, I pulled Abby’s face down to meet mine. “C’mere,” I said.
I let her do all the work that night. I just lay back and watched her ride me—frontways, backwards, even sideways—as her face grew more pink and sweaty, listening to her soft moans intensify into sharp grunts, culminating with her new favorite: loud, authoritative cries of “Oh God!” And all through this my mind flashed from Monica Johnston to Okay Peterson to Frannie and back again—everyone but my wife.
Afterward, she collapsed on top of me, her skin wet and clammy, her breasts hard against my chest, and fell asleep. I lay there for a long time, staring at the wall. The bloodstain was back, dark red, almost black, seeping from behind the portrait of Abby’s parents. Maybe it’s a shadow, I thought, but shadows don’t grow like that. I resisted the impulse to shut my eyes. If the stain was to disappear, I wanted to see it disappear. I didn’t even blink. I remembered what Harper had told me, how the original blood stain had been small. This was not small. It was like the house itself was bleeding. Maybe the woodpecker had penetrated the clapboards, and the wood was now leaking sap through the hole.
Daisy cried from her crib. Had she been crying this whole time, while Abby and I were having sex? Abby’s weight, as thin as she was, pressed down on me. Keeping my eye on the stain, I said, “Wake up.” I nudged her. She groaned. “It’s Daisy,” I said. “She’s crying.”
I pushed Abby off of me, feeling my half-erect cock flop out of her. She groaned again and rolled onto her side. I stood and looked closely at the wall. The blood was real—wet, reflecting the lamp light. I wanted to touch it, but—
Daisy cried. I backed out of the room, still eyeing the stain. One thin line broke off and rolled down the wall.
By the time I was half way through the living room, the crying had ceased. In Daisy’s bedroom I stood beside the crib in the dark. I heard her calm, steady breathing. She hadn’t been crying at all.
The room was cold. I shut the window. Outside, the grass blades twinkled in the moonlight. At the edge of the lawn a large buck stood gazing back at me with red eyes. I waited several minutes for it to turn away, but it just kept watching me. Finally, I walked back to the bedroom. The bloodstain was gone.
16. Star
“Carl!”
I woke up from a thick, vivid dream. I’d been running down the lake road, chased by a truck. In the cab sat Monica Johnston and Okay Peterson, neither of them wearing any clothes. The trees, their limbs just inches above my head, dripped blood. From down the road, just beyond the sulfurous reach of the truck’s headlights, I could hear Daisy crying.
“Carl!”
Abby’s voice sounded strained, slightly panicked. Imagining that something was wrong with Daisy, I bolted from bed and ran into the living room. The baby, perfectly healthy, sat on the floor playing with wooden blocks. Abby stood with her back to me, facing the fireplace.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“How long has that been there?” She pointed to the stone masonry above the fireplace mantel.
The old stone fireplace had been one of the house’s more charming features. The rough, gray-brown stones rose from the floor, framing the fireplace opening, up to the vaulted ceiling. Ever since we moved in we’d discussed what would look best hanging above the varnished wood mantelpiece, something bright and cheerful to contrast with the stone.
“What’re you talking about?” I asked.
“I knew I smelled something rotten. Didn’t I tell you I smelled something rotten?”
I stood beside her and stared at the stones. “I don’t know what you mean.”
She stepped right up to the fireplace and pointed to a spot above the mantel, a little bulge in the stone. “There.”
“What is it?”
“Come closer.”
As I got nearer I could make out a small, grayish brown oval that blended with the stones but, once noticed, stood out. From one end of this oval extended a three-inch long tail.
I jumped back. “What the fuck?”
On the stones, as if glued there, was a dead, half-decomposed mouse.
“Isn’t that gross?” Abby said. “I bet it crawled behind a picture that was hanging there.”
I tried to remember what had been hanging over the mantel when we first looked at the house. The furniture had been sparse, half of it gone already.
“I think there was some sort of bad art hanging there,” Abby said.
I vaguely recalled a lake scene, with bright, unnatural colors.
Abby stepped closer to the dead mouse. “Get me a paper towel.”
Relieved that she was willing to handle this, I got a towel from the kitchen. She took it and reached up for the dead thing. I turned away. Daisy stacked her blocks, red on top of green on top of blue. Abby grunted and I heard a slight tearing sound. I imagined how it felt to pull the mouse’s stiff body from the stone, the tug, the bits of fur and hide.
“There,” Abby said, holding the paper towel in her palm, the mouse lying on its side, its tiny teeth bared, as if it had died angry, or in pain. “It must have eaten some poison and crawled behind the painting to die.”
“It’s been there this whole time?”
She held it up near the stone wall. “Look how well it blends in.”
I turned away, shivering in the heat.
“Watch Daisy while I throw this away,” she said. “Unless you want to.” She held the paper towel up toward my face.
“No, thanks.”
“I didn’t think so.”
I sat on the sofa and looked around the room. The house seemed unsafe to me. Dead mice, woodpeckers, walls that appeared to bleed. Daisy looked up at me with her big eyes, oblivious to the danger.
The pentagram box sat on the coffee table. I picked it up and hefted it. Whatever lay inside slid back and forth as I turned the box this way and that. I was looking for some sort of opening, a button or a spring.
Abby came back in and sat across from me.
“What’d you do with it?” I asked.
“I dug a hole.”
“That was decent of you.”
“I didn’t want to just toss him in the bushes.”
“That’s what I would have done.”
“Of course,” she sighed.
She moved to the floor next to Daisy, who had constructed a tall, wobbly tower of blocks. “We’ll have to get some traps,” Abby said.
I looked at the walls, imagining mice—dozens of them, hundreds—scrabbling around in there.
Daisy took up another block, red and shiny, to set on top of her tower, but she couldn’t quite reach.
“Can mommy do?” Abby asked.
Daisy pulled the block close and screwed up her face into an obvious No. She grabbed the edge of the coffee table and pulled herself to her feet. The tower swayed but did not topple. Daisy tenderly lay the red block on top and pulled her hand away. The tower tipped toward her, then in the other direction. She put out her free hand—the other one still clutched the coffee table—and appeared to will the tower to stand. It continued to wobble, as if held together by an interior wire, but did not fall. Daisy smiled, the triumphant builder.
Then, after looking first to mommy, then daddy, as if to say Look what I did, she reached out and, quickly, decisively, pushed the tower over, sending the red, blue, green blocks bouncing and rolling in all directions. She watched this happen with a look of great satisfaction, and laughed.
*
As I approached Main Street Hardware—one of those old-fashioned mom-and-pop stores that you hardly ever see anymore, with its charming neon OPEN sign in the window and a partial shingled roof over the entrance—a man wearing meticulously clean jeans came out of the store carrying a rake. He nodded as he passed by, as if he knew me. His wavy brown hair looked solid, all one piece, until a gust of wind picked up a few strands and, as if choreographed for a TV commercial, dropped them across one eye. I stood and watched him climb into a luxury SUV.
He rolled down his tinted driver’s side window. “The Pfister School.”
“Excuse me?”
He smiled, amused by my cluelessness. “Mr. Berk’s office.”
What was he talking about? How did he know about all that? He waved, and rolled the window back up. His face disappeared behind the dark glass. He pulled out of the parking space and drove down Main Street.
A bell tinkled when I opened the hardware store door. The cashier, an older lady with curly gray hair, turned and looked me over, perhaps checking for a tool belt or some other sign that I belonged. Apparently I didn’t, for she turned away with a grimace.
The wooden floor creaked beneath my shoes as I searched the aisles for handsaws and other cutting tools. I passed paints and brushes, nuts and bolts, doorknobs and light switch plates. Finally, in the far aisle, I found the saws. Pretending I knew what I was looking for, I picked up a 26-inch contractor-grade short cut handsaw, then a 15-inch saw with a molded grip, and then a tri-fold handsaw. I wondered if I should opt for a carbon steel blade or the three-sided tooth design.
I set the sharp-tooth saw against the edge of the pentagram box, and as I imagined cutting through the hard wood I heard a familiar voice from the next aisle.
“So when will that 150-pound seeder be in, Tom?”
He continued talking in a deep voice, the voice of a big man, but I couldn’t match it with a face or a name. I set down the saw and moved to the end of the aisle. There stood Anders Lehigh talking to a clerk with a red apron. Lehigh looked over and, not recognizing me, continued talking. The clerk—“Tom” was stitched over the chest of his apron—nodded at me, then took in the box in my hands. His eyes widened.
“You got one of them things, too?” he asked.
Lehigh stared at my face and I saw a spark of recognition. Then he noticed the box, too.
“Oh my Lord.”
“Do you know what this is?” I asked.
Lehigh moved toward me so fast I had to back up, afraid he might be about to strike me.
“Can I look at that?”
Before I could even hold it out to him he reached down and grabbed the box from my hand.
“Well, I’ll be.”
“What is it?” Tom asked.
“I made this thing.”
“You?” I said.
“Me and my friend Billy.” He looked at my face. “You live in that house, don’t you? That’s where I know you from.”
“We found it,” I said.
He held it up to the light. “I haven’t thought about this thing in ages.” He turned to Tom. “Billy and I made this in my old man’s workshop. Then we buried it in his yard.”
“Why’d you bury it?” Tom asked.
“It’s a coffin,” Lehigh said. “For Billy’s pet mouse.”
“Mouse?” I asked.
“Yeah. ‘Star.’ That’s why we carved the star here.” He held the box so that the star was right side up.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Hey, can I have this?” he asked. “I know you found it in your yard and all, but it kind of means a lot to me, Mister…uh…”
“Hammond.”
“Right. I mean, you don’t really have any use for it, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Not unless he wants an old dead mouse,” Tom laughed.
“It would sure mean a lot to me.”
“Sure,” I said. “You can have it, I guess.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
He shook the box. Star’s bones rattled inside.
“I was trying to figure out how to open it,” I said.
“Oh, we glued it shut. We didn’t want any dogs or cats getting at Star.”
“That explains it,” Tom said.
“Have you seen this box before?” I asked the old man.
“A young woman brought it in not long ago. Or else one just like it.”
Lehigh laughed. “This is the only one of these suckers. Take it from me.”
“What did she look like?” I asked Tom. “Was she young? Blond?” I was thinking of Monica Johnston.
“No. More like 35, dark hair, slender. Had a little girl with her.”
Lehigh turned to me. “Sounds like your wife.”
“Yeah.” I must have looked as confused as I felt because the two of them became self-conscious, coughing and looking away toward the shovels and axes.
“Well, see ya, Tom,” Lehigh said. “And thanks again, Mr. Hammel.”
“Sure.”
Lehigh turned and headed for the exit.
“Anything I can help you find?” Tom asked.
Why did she lie about the box?
“That I can’t help you with,” Tom said.
Had I said it out loud?
“No,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded and shuffled toward the rear of the store.
Then I remembered who the man with the rake was: he’d been in Berk’s office when I got fired. He was my replacement at the Pfister School.
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