If the Body Allows It
Page 25
I stumble through backstory so the conversation will make sense to the audience in the bookstore. I say Octavia and I talked about how we weren’t the first people in the world who’ve gotten sick and whose fathers have died. But sometimes it feels like our loneliness is unparalleled, and so we try to make connections, to turn coincidence into fate, in order to fill the empty spaces, but instead of feeling a sense of understanding, the empty spaces just grow the more we try to connect and analyze them.
“Until you find the right person to help you through, that is,” I say.
For Octavia that person was her husband, who introduced her to Jesus. She says she’s found peace that way.
“I’m telling the truth when I say I wish I was a believer the way she is,” I tell the audience, and for some reason they laugh.
“No, I mean it.”
And they laugh more.
“Anyway,” I go on, “I told Octavia about how I decided not to tell the father. I knew what I wanted.”
As we spoke, I imagined Octavia in the apartment she shared with her husband and son. They’re in Los Angeles now. I don’t know what the apartment looks like, but I can see citrus trees in the yard—the lemons sunning themselves, round grapefruits almost the size of basketballs, and baby-blue curtains billowing above the windows.
She’d known Ralph—she and I were roommates when I met him—and she asked me if I thought I could work things out with him.
“No,” I said to her on the phone. “That was years ago. He married someone else.”
“So anyway,” I say to the audience. “I told Octavia about the baby, and I wish I could’ve told my father.”
As an afterthought, I add, “My father would have been a good grandfather.”
“So that was it,” I say to the audience in the bookstore. “That was one of the feelings that made me write this book. It’s the feeling that life is always on the brink of never being the same again, and sometimes pieces of our lives fall off the edge, but some things, good and bad, we carry with us after the crash. And those things make us who we are. And then you find something or someone that helps you survive and persevere. For me it was trying to write this book with hope.
“I mean,” I add, “there is friendship and hope in this book. Right? I mean, did you get that? If you read it?”
I sound desperate by now. I know I should stop talking, let the audience go, release their attention before they’re forced to stumble through the rows of chairs, coats in hand, trying to sneak out quietly while pretending they had to leave early all along.
“Does that answer your question?” I ask.
The woman who asked the question nods. Silence inflates in the room, a giant suffocating balloon. No one has any other questions, and it’s time for me to thank the audience for coming and let them disperse to bars to laugh about how awkward I was, how I used the reading as an excuse to share my emotions. Or to forget about the reading entirely and immediately. But I hold on to the silence. There’s a feeling I was hoping for, one I didn’t get tonight. I’m searching faces for someone who might give it to me. Tonight is a night my father would’ve been proud of me. I’m yearning to glimpse the glow of that pride in someone’s eyes. I can’t find it anywhere, and it’s not because the people here despise me, as I worry they do, but simply because none of them is my father. And the longer I look the less likely it seems that I’ll find him.
Acknowledgments
To my agent, Maria Massie, for treating my work so carefully and for advocating for this book, and to Lexi Wangler for pulling me out of the slush: thank you. This book wouldn’t be here without you. How lucky I am to be a part of the MMQ family.
I want to thank Kwame Dawes, Ashley Strosnider, Courtney Ochsner, Timothy Schaffert, Xu Xi, Haley Mendlik, Anna Weir, and everyone at Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press for taking a chance on me. Thank you, Anne McPeak, for your extraordinary copyediting. I’m grateful I can say my first book found its perfect home.
John Lescroart and the Maurice Prize at UC Davis gave early support to this project: thank you for the encouragement when I needed it most.
To my teachers, whether from long ago or very recently, thank you: Joe Cislo, Chris Cronin, and Thisbe Nissen, who introduced me to short stories; Warren Hecht and Julie Orringer, who read my work early on; Lucy Corin and Pam Houston at UC Davis, a superb creative writing program in a beautiful place; Jayne Anne Phillips, who built more than an MFA but a community, too, at Rutgers–Newark, as well as Akhil Sharma, Jim Goodman, and Tayari Jones. And Elizabeth Gaffney for all her support.
Especially among my teachers I would like to thank Yiyun Li for her belief in my work during and after my time at UC Davis; Laura Kasischke, whose early and continuing support in both life and writing has meant more than I can say; and Alice Elliott Dark for her friendship, wisdom, and for pushing me at a time when I needed to be pushed.
I’m very grateful to the editors who have published my work: Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott; Patrick Ryan, Kyle Lucia Wu, Sadye Teiser, Hillary Brenhouse, Jonathan Lee; and especially Brigid Hughes: a more brilliant mentor I could never find.
My friends, from both the writing and the regular worlds, thank you, and you add to the joy of living: Hanna Ketai, Janice Karr, Daniel J. Saleh, Rachel Bourgault, Lena Valencia, Laura Preston, Megha Majumdar, Maria Kuznetsova, Daniel Grace, David Owen, Ellen Kamoe, Ashley Clarke, Aaron Fai, Josh Brown, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Nick Falgout, Melissa Murphy, Kelley McKinney, Masaki Matsuo, Jonathan Hoffer, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Jamel Brinkley, Kristen Radtke, Sidik Fofana, Laura Spence-Ash, Safia Jama, Andrés Cerpa, Nick Fuller Googins, Drew Ciccolo, Tony Cirilo, Michelle Hart, Mel King, Kanika Punwani, Elena Schilder, Olvard Smith, Caitlin Ferguson, Jesse Shuman, and Zach Webb.
Thank you, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, for your best friendship, your spirit, and for always being my last-minute editor on everything I do; and Nicolas Party for your art and your kind soul.
My family has supported me from the beginning and never wavered, and I know how lucky I am to have that. Thank you: my mother, Lynne Cummins, who read the stories I wrote as a child, sent me to writing camp, and who, incredibly, was happy when I chose to study creative writing; my sister, Emily Ross, who has always been equal parts friend and sister, and my new brother, Jonathan Ross; as well as: Kathleen and Dave Devereaux, Joe Cummins and Dede Kinerk, Carson Cummins, Jill Priebe, Jean Priebe, Gail Prohaska Cosgriff, Marty Cosgriff, Abigail Cosgriff and John McKinnon, Charlie and Tarina Cosgriff, and Kenna Hauser. Though we all live great distances from each another, every day you’re with me.
And most of all, to my husband, Francis Cosgriff: thank you. Every day with you is a day well spent on this earth.
About Megan Cummins
Megan Cummins is the managing editor at A Public Space and A Public Space Books. Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, One Teen Story, Guernica, and Electric Literature.
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To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit nebraskapress.unl.edu.