Costume Party

At the Halloween party we are all masked and wearing black. When my friend and I walk through the door, the hosts greet us and tape a name on our backs. It’s a literary character or a famous person, someone scary or someone who wears a mask. We’re supposed to mingle around the room and ask questions until we guess who we are. 

My friend is Captain Ahab. Am I a man? she says. 

Yes. 

Am I in a book? 

Yes. 

Is it a horror novel? 

No, but maybe, psychologically. My friend is stumped. My mask is lacy and blocks out my peripheral vision. The light in the room is orange and the black shapes of the guests drift around me. Am I a woman? I ask Dr Frank-n-furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

Yes, he says. 

Am I in a book? 

Yes. 

Is it a children’s book? 

Yes. 

Hmm. 

The hosts are a writer and a professor. Pretty much everyone at the party is a writer or a professor. The Wicked Witch of the West asks me how my writing's going lately, and I am stumped. Not great, I say, and I switch the subject. Is my character the main character? 

No, the Wicked Witch of the West says. 

I bump into a man wearing a black cape. I sneak a peek at his back. Cruella de Vil. He’s talking about the upcoming election. It’s going to be close, he says. She’s going to win, but it will take a long time to count the votes and there will be conspiracy theories swirling around and potential chaos. 

Are you a political science professor? I ask him.

No, I’m a professor of German history. I’m teaching a class this semester on fascism in Germany in the 1930s. He tells me he has two students in his class who have turned him into the administration for being a communist. I’m going to try to ride it out, he says, until I can retire in a couple of years and then I’m going to move to Germany. 

I don’t know how to respond to this. Am I a scary person? I say, gesturing vaguely at my back. 

Yes, Cruella de Vil says. 

I help myself to crackers and cheese and swallow down a glass of red wine. Earlier in the day I went to the farmer’s market and bought apples and lettuce and two poblano peppers. I gave the rosemary bread lady a bouquet of rosemary sprigs that I’d just cut from my garden. The sky was bright blue and you could almost forget that fascism might be coming to America. 

Back at the party I’ve learned that the author of my character’s book is British and the book was written in the twentieth century. Is it Peter Pan? 

No. 

Is it Harry Potter? 

No. 

Something by Roald Dahl? 

Yes. 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? 

No. 

Matilda? 

Yes. 

I’m stumped. The only character I know in Matilda is Matilda. 

It’s the teacher, Miss Trunchbull, my friend Captain Ahab tells me. This feels anti-climactic. We’re back to talking about politics and is it privileged to want to move somewhere safe? 

Yes. 

But where is safe? 

Berlin is really nice, says Cruella De Vil. I eat a slice of apple tart. I take a picture of myself and send it to my daughter. 

She texts back: Mom, your mask is upside down. 

I laugh and slip it off. The light in the room is a soft golden and the black shapes are lovely, ordinary people. I am thinking about how when I gave the rosemary bread lady the rosemary sprigs, she was so happy, she hugged me. 

Reminder

The pre-school kids on their class visit to the library are cute. They file down the stairs with their fingers against their lips. Shh shh, they say loudly to each other. When they troop past me, they tap their heads and make wide motions with their arms. You’re a library person, one of the little girls tells me, doing the wide arm motion thing again. This means, Library Person. 

Okay, I say. They dance around me as I help them pick out books. The easy ones. Dinosaurs. Princesses. Puppies. Dragons. The more difficult to find. A book about Aurora. A book in the Pig the Pug series. No, not that one. No, not that one either. The one with the orange cover? Yes! The girl who wants an Aurora book is still waiting. (Who is Aurora? I have to google it. Ah. It’s Sleeping Beauty. But we’re out of Sleeping Beauty books.) How about Cinderella? 

No.

Belle? 

No.

Elsa?

No.

One of my co-workers digs around in the back room and comes out with a Little Mermaid book and saves the day. Sorry she was being so picky, one of the teachers tells me, but I wave it off. She knows what she wants. 

Home in the afternoon, and I sit down at my desk to work on the book I’ve been trying to write, but nothing comes. The main character doesn’t know what she wants. This is a problem in a story because wanting is the whole shebang. It goes like this: 

What does the hero want? What is standing in her way? Which leads to conflict. Which keeps the reader turning pages. Think: Dorothy wanting to make it home to Kansas. Or Chief Brody wanting to catch the shark so it will stop eating people over Fourth of July weekend. 

Meanwhile, my character is schlumping around wanting nothing. The world she’s in won’t stop morphing and changing. The world I’m in won’t stop either. I used to be able to do this better. Fit my noise-cancelling headphones over my ears and muffle out the distractions. What if I have lost my writer self? 

Here is something I want. A library person to greet me at the door, welcome me in. Find the missing writerly pieces on the shelves and give them back. 

The pre-school kids finish their visit. They skip past me holding their books. One of them makes the wide armed sign again, and I laugh as I remember. It's me. I am the library person. 

 

Lucky Charm

My daughter is visiting for the weekend, and we browse the shops in my neighborhood. The place where she likes to get custard. The thrift store with the colorful glassware. The feminist gift shop that sells build-your-own charm necklaces. 

Let’s make a necklace, my daughter says.  

No, I think. It’s a reflex from an old self. The one who worries about money, the one who pooh-poohs silly trinkets. All week I’ve been on edge, crossing my fingers for friends in North Carolina who are cleaning up after a hurricane. Another hurricane that just barreled past an aunt who lives in Florida. And how did I end up so lucky, a beautiful fall day in Ohio, a daughter who wants to pal around with me and make a silly necklace?  

Yes, I say, and we spend a ridiculous amount of time pawing through the various charms. Mostly this is me. I forgot to bring my reading glasses, and I can’t see what I’m pawing through. A dog’s face or is that a mouse? Some kind of plant? A feather? 

My daughter laughs. It’s weed, Mom.  

Oh. Ha. Okay. When it’s time to pay, the clerk says I’ve won a chance to roll the dice to win up to fifty percent off my purchase. She hands me a beachball-sized die. I roll it on the floor and it lands on a picture of a cat. The clerk cheers. A cat is the fifty percent off symbol. I am over-the-top excited about my win, posing for pictures, holding the dice, grinning next to my daughter, the two of us festooned in our matching half-price necklaces.

Later, we gorge ourselves on custard and binge-watch a trainwreck of a reality TV show. The stars on the show keep talking about how they feel, but for some reason they pronounce it “fill.” The word echoes in my head, the heartbreak of it, the absurdity. How they fill. How I do. 

Why is it one person's turn for tragedy, another's turn for joy? And what a thin line separates the two. A senseless shift in the weather. A roll of a die. 

Transplanted

I have one goal today. Move the peony plant that’s slowly being strangled by the raspberry bush in the corner of the backyard. Peonies, if you don't know them, are big, brightly-colored flowers that bloom in spring. This one needs more room, more light. I’d meant to move it last fall and never got around to it, and here we are again. But this time I'm making the effort. 

The shovel is out, the new sunny spot scoped out, but I keep getting distracted. Weeds that need to be pulled. A mass of prickly raspberry branches to pick through. I’m listening to a podcast called Family Secrets. Each week the interviewer introduces the program by saying it's about "the lies we tell each other; the lies we tell ourselves." And then she asks, "Do you have a family secret you'd like to share?" 

I laugh as I lope around with my shovel. Oh lady, you wouldn’t believe how many I'd like to share. Here is half of one. I am 12 years old, 13, 14, and I am practically living at my best friend's house. The word practically might be the wrong word. But what is the word for spend every weekend with her family. Follow them along to church. Go on vacation with them. Have a place in their bathroom to put my toothbrush. 

After school I take the bus home with my friend and spend the afternoons with her, praying praying praying as dinnertime looms closer that her mom will invite me to eat with them, a cruel voice in my head whispering, They don’t really want you here. You’re overstaying your welcome. But each night here comes the lovely mother, poking her head into my friend's bedroom, saying, Should I set a place for you tonight, Jody? 

And no hint at all that I am a burden. In my memory she is always wearing an apron. When she hugs me, I can almost pretend that I am one of her daughters. Do the people who save our lives know that they have saved us? 

I wish I had told this person. I meant to but never got around to it and now here we are, too late. But not too late to move this damn peony. My gardening book warns me not to bury it too deep, be careful with the roots. 

I don't. I do. 

A Toast to an Apocalyptic World

There was a story in the newspaper this morning that made me cry. A group of friends in the 1970’s gathering together to eat a fancy breakfast in front of the reflecting pool in Washington DC to bring some joy to a friend who’d just been diagnosed with cancer. A photographer snapped a picture and it appeared in the newspaper, but no one ever knew the story behind it. The photographer’s daughter found the picture after he died, tracked the original friends down, and they recreated the photo, but now, all of them older and with missing people, empty chairs. 

I don’t know why the story made me cry. The beauty in the original photo, the young people dressed up and clinking glasses across the table. The waiters with their serving trays. The pool shimmering in the background. All of the lovely ways people come through for each other. 

Sometimes we forget this. I forget this. 

The news is terrible and it’s always terrible. I’m driving home from work under a gray, menacing sky, the hurricane that touched down nearly one thousand miles away tearing the branches off the trees in my neighborhood. While I sleep, people I know have been flooded out of their homes. Another storm is gathering strength and heading our way. 

But just this week a neighbor dropped off a bag of freshly picked pears. Another neighbor gave us a jar of honey. The woman we always buy homemade rosemary bread from at the farmers market threw in a couple of bonus rolls, “just because.” Two friends invited me out for dinner. Another friend who visited us recently sent us a gift card for the gourmet ice cream shop up the street, and honestly, it’s like she sent us a million dollars. This ice cream! I could eat a scoop every day for the rest of my life. 

Last Sunday I wrote about the unrelenting heat, the drought, a dead deer rotting on the sidewalk. Today, I sit at my desk looking out at the rain, a squirrel hopping across the backyard, the fall flowers along the fence coming into bloom. I don’t know what I am trying to say. 

I want to set a fancy table and gather all of my loved ones close. I want to freeze the moment as we clink our glasses, cherish the world we are given.  

Neighborhood Drama

It’s fall, but the summer keeps going. 

Ninety-five-degree day after 95-degree day, the garden barely holding on, browning, burning. I’m worried about the toad in the crunchy oregano patch, the birds listlessly flitting around the powerlines. Does everyone have enough water? Last week something died in our neighbors’ backyard. The smell was so bad it was hard to be outside without pulling your shirt up over your nose. 

Later in the week, there was a deer carcass rotting on the side of the road. I think it was the mother of fawn triplets. We’d often see the family roaming around the neighborhood, munching on what’s left of everyone’s hostas. Now I can add Orphaned Fawn Triplets to my list of things to feel vaguely uneasy about. 

On the neighborhood social media page everyone takes a side. What to do about the deer, the plants, the weather, the city, the country, the world. Meanwhile, there’s a mystery unfolding outside the apartment complex up the street. (This is me, spinning out stories on my walks with the dog, but hear me out.)   

Scene: A suburban lawn. A strip of sunflowers eight or nine feet high overlooking the sidewalk. A metal bowl filled with water, set out for dogs. 

A middle-aged woman saunters by with a dog and thinks, How nice.  

Next day: The water bowl's missing. In its place is a sign in angry marker: “F OFF TO WHOEVER STOLE THE WATER BOWL”

Well, that escalated quickly, thinks the middle-aged woman. She ponders buying a new bowl, leaving it in front of the sign, a reminder that not everyone’s a thief and our dogs appreciate the gift of water on another sweltering day. But she forgets about it. There’s dead deer and orphaned fawn triplets to worry about. 

Flash forward several days. Now there’s a large cement block with a water bowl screwed into it. A new sign: GOOD LUCK STEALING THIS, ASSHOLE!

The End.

But I have so many questions. Who lives in the apartment building? Who planted the sunflowers? Who stole the water bowl? DID someone steal the water bowl? Is the person who planted the sunflowers the same person who has such strong feelings about missing water bowls? 

The dog drinks the water, and we continue around the block. The deer carcass is gone, finally picked up by the city. And in our front yard, the fawn triplets. They munch my dying plants, seemingly unfazed, silent witnesses to our strange burning world.  

 

So Many Stars

Every morning my job is to make the coffee. Here’s how to make the coffee: push the ON button. The trick is it takes an hour for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew. (This is an enormous coffeemaker. It makes 60 cups of coffee. So I have to get down there early.) 

Down there is the dining hall. Where I am is a kids’ camp somewhere in Maine. My son and daughter-in-law are hosting a big party over Labor Day weekend. They’ve invited all of their family and friends and organized what basically amounts to a Camp for Adults. We’re assigned cabins and bunks. There’s a daily schedule with activities. Hikes. Swimming. Meals in the dining hall. A sign up sheet for volunteer help. 

My big contribution: Push the coffee button. I’m supposed to do it by 5:30 am. Day one, I’m forty-five minutes late. A miscommunication with alarms. When I realize it, I’m tearing out of my sleeping bag and half running down the dirt road toward the dining hall. No big deal, Mom, my son tells me later. Turns out my son-in-law had beat me to it on the button-pushing, and anyway, the rest of the cabins didn’t wake up and get moving until after seven. Whew. 

Day two, I’m a pro. A quick walk under the trees in the growing light, past the lake, the docks jutting out onto the water for the kids. I am having flashbacks to Girl Scout summer camp. I only went twice. One week when I was eleven, a week when I was twelve. But the two weeks take up an outsized space in my memory. For example, I still remember the lyrics to the songs we sang around the campfire. The names of the girls in my cabin and the camp counselors. The recipe for a dessert we were taught to make called Peach Yum Yums. 

The funny thing is I hated camping. An accumulation of crappy and occasionally traumatic experiences on so many ill-fated family camping trips. But Girl Scout camp, I loved. It suddenly occurs to me that it wasn’t camping that bothered me. Night at the Adult Camp, we have a bonfire and toast marshmallows for s’mores. The sun has just gone down and it’s hard to believe how many stars there really are in the sky. All this time and every night. Family and friends around me, I have never felt so comfortable in my life. 

Last morning off to push the coffee button, I walk slowly down the road, past the lake. I am not afraid of the dark anymore, and I am making progress on my fear of the woods. If everyone wasn’t still sleeping, I would belt out the happy song that is playing in my head.