THE GRIEF VACATION
Five weeks after her sister died, she was scheduled to speak at a writers’ conference. She’d been invited nearly a year before. Her husband kept assuring her she could cancel: she was grieving. Too true.
But she was getting better, sort of. By this point, she only started crying when someone approached and told her how sorry they were to hear about her sister. Unfortunately, she lived in a small town, so this happened every time she went anywhere, even to the stupid grocery store, that’s her in the freezer section, door wrenched open, doubled over in the mist, tears pocking the stupid faces of the stupid frozen pizzas, all because another stupid couple had come and put their warm and stupid arms around her.
She kept not being able to write the email, the email to the conference director, the one that began “sorry” and “sister” and “sudden.” She kept not being able to write it until finally it was too late, she had to board that plane.
When she disembarked, a college student waited, holding a sign with her name. He grinned, recognizing her from her author photo, and lifted her duffel from her shoulder, then drove her in his doorless Jeep over an arcing bridge to the island, the pretty little island. As he sped along, he questioned her, but only about her books. Her books! Her news had not reached this outlying kingdom. She answered, listened to her answers. Her advice was sound. Her voice unwavering. Her body angled toward his. She was impersonating a woman whose sister was extant, and workshopping her impersonation.
She passed. She taught a class on metaphor which was well received. She dined with the other writers and when they laughed she laughed and observed herself laughing and thought, This is . . . mirthful. She drank wine at the wine-drinking times and signed books at the book-signing times. Beach walks occurred. Occasionally she felt something hysterical winging up through her throat, the propulsion of it could almost lift her off the ground, a howl, or a laugh, or some combination new to the human register, but she did not vocalize those vowels.
After three days, she returned home. The plane bounced twice as it landed. She gathered her belongings from the overhead bin. To prepare to meet the faces she would meet, she stepped into her suit of grief. She pulled it up, over her legs, her hips. She threaded her arms into the sleeves of grief. She huffed it over her back. She snugged it around her shoulders. She buttoned herself tight. Its weight was dear. Dear, dear, dear. She would wear it forever now.
WHEN THEY GROW UP
My oldest child will hate me because I wrote an entire book about her. My middle child will hate me because I wrote hardly a word about him. But the baby; ah, the baby. When I write about him, I call it fiction, and I’m always sure to mention he has a big penis.
A RECKONING OF KISSES
—He placed his beer on the pool’s lip, then pulled me into his. I’ll wager that, on the scale of kiss-taste, a drag of Marlboro followed by a swig of Bud in a forbidden pool in the chlorinated dark still ranks pretty high.
—Through a chain-link. Soccer field. Drummer in a punk band.
—Curled around my firstborn’s body, flesh-drunk, I kissed her chins and cheeks and tiny soft lips which parted, and for the briefest of moments we soul-kissed.
—I’d met the boy from the next town on my sixteenth birthday, in line at the DMV. He told me I was pretty and asked for my number. I’d never felt so grown up in my life. When he called, I said yes, so he picked me up and drove me to a lake with a boathouse. Once inside, he licked my face.
The next time he called I begged my sister to tell him I’d been sent to boarding school. She did, but charged me thirty minutes of back-scratching.
—Years before, my sister and I practiced on each other in a hotel bathroom. We also critiqued each other’s “sexy walk.” We never spoke of this again.
—After snowmobiling in Wisconsin. His lips were so chapped that they cracked mid-kiss and I swallowed his blood. I thought this should end up meaning more than it ended up meaning.
—Sitting on the fountain rim in Prague, I heard a commotion behind me. Before I could turn, something slicked the back of my neck—bird droppings?—and then the skinny back of a Romani (“Gypsies,” I’d been warned by the Czechs, “all thieves”) sprinted past, his hoot lingering after his boot soles flashed around the corner.
Was it a dare? An insult? Panicked flirtation? A distraction designed to remove my wallet from my bag? Here I sit, twice-my-life away, puckered, still responding to that kiss.
—The one with the girl. I kissed her not for her sake, or my own, but for the boys who were egging us on. Were I again presented with her soft lips, I’d do better.
—Strange that after all the lips, the censored kiss is the one I gave my daughter. Fourteen years ago I published a poem about it, which, the editor said, received some “interesting” feedback. Hate emails. All from women.
Recently, I found them. This time, they struck me as funny. Maybe, I thought—for so this world ripens us—maybe the women would, too.
—What’s a kiss but two eels grappling in a cave of spit? Best not to overthink it.
—My grad school boyfriend had a mustache and beard. I didn’t imagine I’d like them, but I did. I could kiss him for hours, the halo of scratchy hair making the central hot-soft even hot-softer.
But then came the month when we couldn’t make rent, so he got a job delivering pizza, a spectacularly bad idea. Fayetteville’s streets twisted around hills, and he had no sense of direction, so his pizzas were reliably late and cold. Tipping actually was just a city in China. Within three months he’d get rear-ended by a bozo without insurance. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I wanted to tell you: drivers had to be clean-shaven. It was policy.
Before his first shift, he took a razor from its package. He entered the bathroom hirsute, and exited . . . wrong. I kissed him, and the kiss, too, was wrong. He slumped on the bed with his red, scraped jowls. “Wait a minute,” I whispered, inspired, “I’ll be right back.” I took his razor and shaved “down there,” shaved off every single hair. I thought it would be a turn-on, but I didn’t feel sexy. Not at all. I looked like a child, like a Barbie. Now we were in it together, broke, depressed, slumped, razor-burned, and bald-jowled.
Reader, I married him.
—Today is our daughter’s fifteenth birthday. These days, she and I rarely kiss.
—Maybe, at the end, there will be a reckoning of kisses. Maybe, along with good deeds, they tally our generosities of flesh. Maybe how we’re judged is this: Were you a waste of breath? Maybe eternity feels like an endless kiss.
SALVAGE
Tommy’s parents wave from the porch as our minivan pulls up. His dad smiles, and that’s when I see he’s missing about half of his teeth.
Before retiring a few years back, Gerald was a mechanic. During high school, he’d apprenticed at his uncle’s garage, then serviced army vehicles while stationed in Germany, then returned home and kept fixing cars. Worked “from can to can’t,” worked Saturdays, feeding himself into the maw of busted trucks in unairconditioned Alabama, feeding a wife and three kids. Eventually he’d own his own shop, Franklin Automotive. In addition to repairs, he had a line on “totals,” wrecks the insurance company didn’t consider worth fixing. Gerald considered otherwise. He’d buy two or three of the same model at salvage auction and Frankenstein them together. Technically he wasn’t allowed to sell them—“branded title” and all that—but he figured there was no harm in it, as long as the customer knew. He loved to negotiate, and that man could sell an icebox to an Eskimo.
Twenty years before, I’d bought my first car from him, after Tommy and I were engaged. I drove it, a black Cherokee, for four years, but it was haunted. Before he cobbled it together, I’d made the mistake of wandering his scrap yard and discovered the salvaged Jeeps. I stepped over the witchgrass and peered into the badly front-ended wreck. Dangling from the spiderwebbed windshield, a clump of long blonde hair.
Gerald’s body, eighty-two, is the one chassis he can’t rep
air. Shingles, macular degeneration, hypertension, a spot on his kidney that needs watching, pneumonia, asthma, steroids for the asthma: so many small-parts failures. And now, the teeth. He stopped going to the dentist years ago. Finally got his rotten ones pulled. Gerald sighs as we lower ourselves into the living room’s recliners. New teeth, he’s been told, will set him back a pretty penny.
How much, we ask.
Sixteen thousand. He pauses. Wish I knew how much use I’d get out of ’em. He fiddles with his inhaler. How much longer I’ll be here below. How many meals I got left, you reckon?
Tommy, Tommy’s mom, and me: what can we do but shrug.
Don’t need a full set, he says, addressing the ceiling, as if bargaining. As if God’s scrap yard is lousy with spare teeth, all reasonable offers considered.
This, coming from a man who’s worked six days a week for over sixty years: All’s I need’s enough to chew a steak.
MARRIED LOVE, V
I took a spectacular fall during a run, a real airborne wipeout that ended with a hard bounce and a gravel-spraying skid. I was pretty banged up, especially my left palm and my knees which were rivering blood down my shins, but nothing seemed broken. I limped home, grateful to find my husband there; he makes me braver. “It’s nothing,” I countered as he cooed and washed my wounds and dressed them in monster bandages.
My knees scabbed quickly, but I couldn’t get the palm to heal, because, I assumed, I couldn’t keep it rested and dry, what with the bodies of three children in my dominion. Finally it scabbed over in a thick, puckered star that itched and had a black lump. Gradually the star shrunk, until finally all that was left was this weird white blister, still black at the tip.
I waited for the blister to shrink, but it didn’t. I waited for the black tip to fade, but it didn’t. Although my palm didn’t hurt—as long as I didn’t applaud or do push-ups—it looked ugly. My youngest wouldn’t hold my “bad hand” when we walked to pre-K. And after a while, I began to have the discomfiting feeling that the black thing was a foreign object beneath my skin. That my hand grew the white pillow to push away the black thing.
When I called Faculty Health and the nurse asked the reason for my appointment, I described my blister. She paused, then said, “Can you come in right away?”
I did, but the examining GP shook her head and said I’d have to see the hand surgeon in Jackson.
“A hand surgeon? Really? In Jackson? Really?”
She asked, “What days are you free this week?”
Now it was my turn to shake my head. “Couldn’t we, just, you know . . .” I made a little fork-and-knife sawing motion.
“Hmm,” she said. “Let me see if Dr. Yates is in the building.”
“Shoot,” Dr. Yates drawled, a few minutes later, palpating his fleshy thumbs around my palm, “We got this.” He had me lie back and gave my hand a shot and then called loudly for his nurse to bring his “scalpel with the claws.” Thus began the play-by-play that included “Almost got it” and “Whoopsie” and “Slippery little devil” and “You know, I started out as an English major.” I could take the pain, but not the narration. I began to think I might pass out. Finally, after he said, “I’m just gonna rummage around in here until I nab it,” I told him I was glad he was taking care of me but hoped he could continue silently.
He didn’t speak again until he said, “Lookee here.”
When I opened my eyes, he pointed to a surprisingly neat incision in my palm, like a slit for a dime. Proudly, he bandaged me, then handed me a plastic syringe. Inside its calibrated tube, the jagged piece of gravel.
I was glad my husband was home because I couldn’t wait to show him. I held the syringe before his eyes, flicked it to make it rattle, and we laughed a little.
My husband said, “What are you going to do with it?”
“Do with it? I’m going to pitch it.”
“I want it.”
“You want it?”
“Yeah. I want it. I want to keep it. I’ll put it in my office. It was in your hand for a month. It was a part of you.”
I want to marry this man, I thought. I want to marry him right now.
But of course I already had, about nineteen years before.
ADDENDUM TO “SALVAGE”
Won a thousand dollars in a literary contest for one of these essays.
Bought my father-in-law a tooth.
NOTES
p. 23:“Why I’m So Well Read” is for David Gavin.
p. 43:“11. And I’ve Been Searching Ceaselessly For You Ever Since, Mon Amour” was written after listening to “Heavy Sleep” by pianist Bruce Levingston, and I dedicate it to him.
p. 90:“When People Bemoan the Commodification of Art” is for Blair Hobbs.
p. 95:“The Grief Vacation” is for Tom DeMarchi.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APR: “Home Button,” “I Come from a Long Line of Modest Achievers,” “‘If You Were Born Catholic, You’ll Always Be Catholic,’” “I Knew a Woman,” “Married Love,” “Married Love, II,” “Married Love, III,” “Married Love, IV,” “Returning from Spring Break, Junior Year at Notre Dame,” “Still Have the Playbill,” “When They Grow Up,” and “Why I’m Switching Salons”
Arkansas International: “Another Missing Chapter in the Parenting Handbook,” “Daughter, They’ll Use Even Your Own Gaze to Wound You,” and “My Father’s Reminiscences”
Brevity: “Salvage” and “Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True”
Blackbird: “Safety Scissors” and “What I Learned in Grad School”
Creative Nonfiction: “I Survived the Blizzard of ’79”
The Cincinnati Review: “Galore,” “Mommy Wants a Glass of Chardonnay,” and “Sweet Nothing”
Five Points: “Another Reason I Love My Mother,” “Bad Break,” “What I Think About When Someone Uses ‘Pussy’ as a Synonym for ‘Weak,’” and “Why I’m So Well Read”
Grist: “Nine Months in Madison”
Guernica: “A Reckoning of Kisses”
Gulf Coast: “Expiration Date,” “I Was Not Going to Be Your Typical,” “Low-Budget Car Dealership Commercial,” and “Now I Glance Up the First Time They Call My Name”
The Kenyon Review Online: “11. And I’ve Been Searching Ceaselessly For You Ever Since, Mon Amour,” “Our Friend the Memoirist,” and “Pass the Vodka”
The Missouri Review: “The Grief Vacation,” “Married Love, V,” and “One Doesn’t Always Wish to Converse on Airplanes”
Ninth Letter: “Emulsionar” and “The Neighbor, the Chickens, and the Flames”
The Oxford American: “Disharmony,” “Proof,” “Small Fry,” “Small Talk at Evanston General,” “The Visitation,” “When People Bemoan the Commodification of Art,” and “Your Turn”
The L.A. Review: “Goner”
The Normal School: “Orange-Shaped Hole”
The Southern Review: “Heating and Cooling”
“Goner” was the recipient of the Orlando Prize in Creative Nonfiction from A Room of Her Own. “What I Think About When Someone Uses ‘Pussy’ as a Synonym for Weak” was reprinted in All We Can Hold: A Collection of Poetry on Motherhood. “Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True” was reprinted in First Encounters with One’s Own Femininity. My thanks to the Mississippi Arts Council for an Individual Artist Grant and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi for a summer grant.
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Mary Miller both read this book in an early draft, and I thank them. Molly McCully Brown read several drafts, and our conversations and coffees shaped this book in many ways. Ivo Kamps, Chair of the English Department, makes possible things that appear otherwise. My colleagues and students at the University of Mississippi and friends in Oxford and at Square Books provided inspiration and encouragement.
Judith Weber, my agent, of SobelWeber fame, continues to provide wise and generous counsel. My editor, Jill Bialosky, has been a joy to work with. It’s a pleasure to be in the good hands of
the good folks at W. W. Norton—I’m talking about you, Erin Sinesky Lovett, Nomi Victor, and Steve Colca. My former editor, Carol Houck Smith (1923–2008) spent her sixty-year publishing career at Norton, and her guiding spirit endures.
My mom, Mary Anna McNamara Malich, affirms me daily in many loving ways, as she has from the start, despite noting that “This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.”
ALSO BY BETH ANN FENNELLY
The Tilted World (with Tom Franklin)
Unmentionables
Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
Tender Hooks
Open House
Copyright © 2017 by Beth Ann Fennelly
All rights reserved
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