What They Don't Tell You About Writers

What they don’t tell you about writers is that sometimes they’re not all there. You’re talking to one. She’s nodding politely. You think she’s listening to you. Actually she’s not. She’s miles away. I’ve been writing a lot of short stories recently. That means coming up with a lot of characters in rapid succession. I need names, alright, so I was in class (not this class, I swear) and someone just mentioned the name Emma, and I thought, that’s perfect. Ordinary but with some character. I like a name that doesn’t stand out unless the character who carries it makes it stand out. I like really weird names too, but that’s a different story. So, I thought, Emma, and then I thought, who IS Emma, what’s her story, she definitely has freckles on her nose and she cuts her blond hair short and she likes…bananas. I’m not sure what the next topic in class was. It was probably very educational. Anyway.

            What they don’t tell you about writers is that sometimes more than one of them is there. This past week I’ve been about four people. One of them is a fifteen year old boy named Bobby. I’m obsessed with baseball and sort of oblivious to the fact that my sister Molly thinks she’s conversing with aliens. I’m also a young guy named Jonah who lives in a sort of medieval Wales type setting. I’m obsessed with music and writing songs and I’m falling in love with a selkie. I’m also Jonah’s friend Gwen who sings and slaps sense into people and has a bit of an alcohol problem. On the side, I have this life as a college student (do you call that a life? Or do you call it a prolonged homework session?). Sometimes, if you pay close attention, you can tell which me I am. For instance, sometimes I get really spacey and walk into the ocean in the middle of winter so I can anoint myself with saltwater and wait for a mysterious seal to appear. Bobby days are good days but they don’t happen very often. If I’m looking at you with a glazed expression in my face and my eyes are bloodshot and I show zombie-esque sings of deterioration, you’re probably looking at the “real” me.

            What they don’t tell you about writers is that they didn’t choose this. Maybe they’ve tried to quit. Maybe one year they barely wrote a word, and it was the most miserable year of their life. They don’t tell you that writers hurt, that some days every word on the page feels like another messy drop of blood that no one was supposed to see. They don’t tell you about the words that just have to come, the way thoughts on paper are like breathing and when you take away the paper, the thoughts are gone too. They don’t tell you that sometimes writing saves the writer’s life, that there’s days when a writer can’t open her eyes or get out of bed or face one more day in this body so she slips into another one, and that’s how she makes it through. They don’t tell you that a writer is a writer, they way a cat is a cat or a mother is a mother. They don’t tell you about the writer who gets up at five in the morning, before the robins start to sing, so she can steal a precious hour at the keyboard and for one short part of the day, really live.

My First Cup of Coffee

I drank my first cup of coffee in a one-time Ecuadorian monastery. Trays of bread and plates of tropical fruit graced the table, and steaming eggs I couldn’t eat. I flipped over my little white ceramic teacup, oval saucer, spoon-formed dent in the rim. “Té o café?” the waitress asked. I hesitated a second. “Café.”

            She poured it, black. The scent was my grandma’s house and my best friend and bagel mornings with my aunts. It was also a little bit of sin. Sin burned when I drank it, that fire sip of steam. Sin tasted just like it smelled.

            Good.

            I should mention that this scene happened just over a month ago.

            People ask me why I don’t drink coffee. If I know them well enough, I tell them. It’s addictive, for one thing. And I get addicted. One of my addictions is avoiding addictions. If you don’t know what’s missing, why start?

            And if you can avoid a beverage that involves the destruction of rainforests, why start?  

            So was it ironic that I was sitting there, my first trip to a tropical country, finally drinking the drink that’s been such a destructive export? I looked around the table at my fellow classmates, mostly biology students—the people, the class I’d be with for these next two weeks. Yeah, a bit ironic; yeah, maybe my tongue’s burned-numb bite really was no accident. But I wasn’t eating the eggs. I wasn’t adding milk. And a skinny vegan in Ecuador had to take sustenance where she could find it.

            I lifted the coffee to my lips again, and this time tasted it slow. If I closed my eyes I probably could have seen my grandma’s apartment outside of Oakland; I could have been eight again, waking up on her living room floor to the sound of the coffee grinder and that big rainbow poster of the Beatles up on her wall. I didn’t know they were the Beatles back then. There were a lot of things I didn’t know.

            If you don’t know what’s missing, why start?

            I didn’t close my eyes. I looked around, took in this room, low ceiling, stone windowless walls. Over dish-clinks and wandering snatches of talk I could hear the fountain in the monastery courtyard—the first sound those monks would hear, maybe, on their way down here to mess. I didn’t know these people; I didn’t know this place. I barely knew those Spanish words that had slipped from my tongue. Café negra, por favor. No milk. Just give me memories.

            Something to stand on in this new journey. Something old in something new.

             

Laying Down the Lie--For the First Time

No one was looking. That wasn’t something that should have mattered, but it did: no one was looking, and on the kitchen floor was a gray-pink chunk of play dough the size of the last digit of my thumb. Doughy, salty, slightly gritty—I barely remember the taste now, but at five or six years old it was a well-known if seldom pursued pleasure. Usually samplings consisted of the dough that clung around my fingernails, the residual taste after playing with my brother before I washed my hands. My mom must have known I ate play dough. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Here, though, was this delectable piece, and nobody was watching. 

                Only somebody was.

                I didn’t realize my mom was there until I’d already scooted across the flower-patterned kitchen linoleum and popped the play dough into my mouth. Then I looked up. And up. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, dark window behind her. She must have just come into the room.

                “Did you just eat play dough?” she asked, or something to that effect.

                And I told her, “No.”

                It’s the first lie I remember telling—the first time I consciously considered the fact that was I was saying was not true. The immediate shame I felt afterwards has blotted the taste of that particular piece of play dough from my mind. It wasn’t the deed in itself. That salty morsel didn’t matter, and neither did the fact that the play dough was used, the floor semi-clean. I wouldn’t be punished, not more than a scolding, I wasn’t afraid of that. But something felt wrong. I’d broken a trust. I was not supposed to eat play dough, and I’d snuck and done it anyway.  

                She knew, of course. Probably she’d watched the whole thing: my cautious slide from the play room to the kitchen, the quick shooting out of my hand. She could prove nothing, though, and I don’t think she tried to. She let the lie stand: unchallenged, but not unpunished. Because that feeling stayed with me, of having used words against one of the people I loved most in my life. I’d covered something up; she, so I thought, had not seen through my cover. I, then, was a lesser person than she thought me. There was something in me she must never see.  

My shame now when I tell a lie is much less than it was then—and that in itself is, I think, something to be ashamed of. I’ve gotten used to the idea that, inside, I’m not the person whom others assume me to be. I have to remind myself sometimes that there is that moment of choice. Show the world the face you want them to see? Or admit you ate the play dough—and live with yourself afterwards?  

To Tell You the Truth...An Early Memory

I was in awe of Katherine. I was three and she was--five? Seven? Old enough, anyway, to seem all-knowing. She was one of three regulars at the daycare my mom ran from home. She was tall and smart and she could stand on her head. I tried to stand on my head, but even with my feet up on the wall, I couldn't get very far. My shirt kept falling down in front of my face and no matter how long I stayed like that the world still didn't look upside down, the way Katherine said it should.

Somehow though the fact that I worshiped her didn't prevent us from fighting. We were in the room I shared with my five-year-old brother Nick. He was there too, and probably so were Russel and Sammy, the other daycare kids. The two beds--my brother's big wooden one, mine white metal, small--had become a sultan's palace and a magic carpet. We were being characters from the Disney movie Aladdin.

Unfortunately, there could only be one Jasmine.

"You be Jasmine's tiger," Katherine told me, or something like that. So I was for a while, but Katherine, jumping from bed to bed, was obviously having too much fun. I'm not exactly sure what form the argument took. I don't think I ever got to be Jasmine. The boys looked on as both of us girls ended the day in tears.

Part 2:
This was difficult. Most of my earliest memories are about three seconds long, and don't really make much of a story. For this one, I'm not sure if all these events actually occurred in one day. I'm not sure exactly what Katherine said to me word for word, but I know the gist of her message. My memory of the room's layout is vague--I know those were our beds, but the mental image I have of them comes from later memories, not this one. I think though that if I were to use this in a memoir, I wouldn't have a problem with calling it Creative Nonfiction. I'm pretty sure the bones of the story are accurate. I might reinforce my uncertainty a little for an actual memoir--stipulate that I really don't know exactly what was said. Overall though I think the memory is fairly accurate--and the details I might have gotten wrong aren't details that matter, either to the story arch or to the people involved.

As for Joan Didion's claim that "if you remember it, then it's true": I do believe that the essence of a memory can sometimes be more important than what actually happened. At the same time, I have some memories that I've intentionally blocked, and now, if asked to revisit them, I think large portions of the truth would be missing. So I would only take Didion's claim so far. If you remember it, it's true for you. Sometimes it's also true for the rest of the world, and sometimes through your truth you can help others reach a deeper truth than they would have with "just the facts." I think personal truths like Didion's are valuable, sometimes more valuable than a surface truth about which everyone can agree. But that's different from saying, "if you remember it, then it's objectively true for everyone."