I is for Inappropriate Encounter or the Beginning of Something Exciting?

 (Excerpt from The Lemonade Year, a finished novel seeking representation)

 

 

I want a good stiff drink and to disappear. From my hiding spot in the corner, I watch the motley collection of people out late on a Thursday, in a smoky bar, playing decade old music. College kids and old hippies, people in dress pants and shiny black shoes, no one seems to fit the other and it seems a good place to hide.

“Remember me?” A young man slips into the empty seat in front of me. “Oliver, from Elm Village.”

I take a rather large sip of what is indeed a good stiff drink and nod. It had only been a few days ago that I had hugged him a good minute longer than is socially acceptable and then kissed him full on the mouth. His hair is the color of balsa wood and even in the low light of the bar his eyes are like the liquid flow and pool of the river’s edge, at both times green and blue, murky and translucent.

“You’re name’s Nina,” he says, shifting around in the seat until he appears much more comfortable than I am.

“Yes it is,” I reply and try not to look him in the face again.

“I knew that,” he says. “You know, then.”

The parking lot.

“I’m glad,” I say, fidgeting, endlessly fidgeting. “It makes that whole scene slightly less desperate. Don’t you think?”

“Don’t give yourself a hard time,” Oliver says and dips his head a bit so that he looks me in the eye. “It’s part of my job to comfort people.”

“Yes,” I say, “but do most people cling to you and smell your hair. And then kiss you on the mouth like they’re not a total stranger?”

He shifts again, sitting unencumbered in his seat, back and tilted. The bar walls tighten in and the voices around us grow unintelligible.

“I get that a lot, actually,” he says. “And you weren’t a total stranger.”

“That happens to you often?” I say and finally look at him again.

“Oh yeah,” he says, smiling at himself. “It’s the scrubs. Women go crazy for them in the grocery store. They think I’m a doctor.”

“You don’t tell them any different?” I say, amused and distracted.

“You kidding?” he says and leans forward to take a sip of his drink. He’s drinking a dark beer in a cold glass and I’m relieved that he’s at least of the age of legal intoxication.  “Buys me some time. Much better than what I really do.”

“What you really do is commendable,” I say. “Most people wouldn’t be able to face all that every day.”

“Maybe I ought to stick with the truth.” he says. He leans in closer, puts his arms on the table, levels his eyes to mine.

 “Truth is relative,” I say. I know he’s flirting. I know I am too. “Besides,” I say, “I kiss everybody. I just kissed that guy over there.”

I point at the oldest, ugliest man I can find. Oliver laughs out loud.  I should pull away from this, but the distraction is intoxicating. We both seem very aware of the electricity between us.

“I don’t even know you,” I say to him, trying to pull myself out of this bubble of frivolity.

“Doesn’t that make it easier?” he asks.

He looks different in plain clothes. I’m too close to forty for comfort. If he’s twenty-five I’d be amazed.

OMG-am sitting in a bar with a gorgeous younger man- thinking about to do something really rash.

Do it girlfriend

Send us pictures

How young are we talking?

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Oliver and I sit for a few moments in that uncomfortable sort of silence that’s created by the want of saying something but having nothing safe to say. We watch each other sip at our drinks.

 “It was a good funeral,” he says when his beer is done. “I hope it’s alright that I went.”

“Of course,” I say. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you. Not that I would have had the nerve to speak.”

He smiles at me and waves the comment off.

“So how was the family mourning vigil?” he asks. “I hate that part. What the hell are you suppose to say to all those people? How many times can you take someone telling you what a terrible loss it is? No shit, huh. Thanks for forcing me to talk about it over and over to every unearthed aunt and uncle within a day’s drive.”

I laugh. A real deep laugh. One that almost makes me cry, but pushes through into more laughter. I need this release from grief and the weight of mouring. I've been holding onto my sadness like he's an old friend, like I'm showing him around town for the weekend, pointing out all the tourist traps and scenic views. I need to send him home.

“It was fantastic,” I say in answer to Oliver’s question.

“Glad to hear it,” he says and the corners of his mouth turn up.

  I feel an urge to press my lips to his again. I’m like the last of the tulip now. I feel my petals pulling backwards, bending toward something I don’t recognize.

I drink the rest of my beverage and smile at him.

Oliver signals for the barkeep and in about sixty seconds I’m beginning the first Jack and Coke of what will probably be one Jack and Coke too many. This was my Jack’s drink. He thought it was humorous. The irony is not lost on me. I feel yanked back in time to a place much less burdened with responsibility and the knowledge of life’s cruel pranks.

Ok sadness, I say to myself—you sit over there for a while—I need a break.

The longer Oliver and I stay, the closer we get and by the time our drinks are empty again we’re pressed together against the back wall of the ugliest bar in town with no more room between us than the space a heartbeat takes.

I look back once at my sadness. He’s ordered a drink and is talking to the lady at the next table. Just a few more minutes, I signal to him and he nods an ok.

I turn my focus back to Oliver. This isn’t like the parking lot, where I was too caught up in my own grief to notice what being close to Oliver feels like. His lips press against my collar bone and I release a breath I didn’t know I was holding. When he kisses me, I’m aware of nothing but his mouth on mine, warm and unfamiliar. His hands on me feel like coming up out of the water, air hitting wet skin piece by piece, making me aware of the nape of my neck, the small of my back, the curve of my waist as it gives way to hip and thigh. This time it feels like waking up.

G is for Gone Crazy (just for a second)

(Excerpt from The Lemonade Year, finished novel seeking representation.)

At the nursing home no one says the word “dead” to me. They all say “we’re so sorry for your loss” like perhaps Dad has just been misplaced and will turn up underneath a couch cushion. It’s not their fault really. There is nothing good to say and saying nothing would be worse.


A nursing aid named Oliver helps me load Dad’s belongings onto a cart and take them out to my car. We don’t say anything to each other as we walk out into the sunlight and unpack the boxes into my trunk. What a weird job, caring for these people you can’t possibly make well.

I thank him for helping me and extend my hand to shake. He takes it and presses my palm between both of his.

“Nate was an awesome guy,” Oliver says, referring to my father in a familiar way that makes me jealous. “I miss him.

“Thank you,” I say and I mean to press my other hand around his but instead I step closer to him and we embrace.

After the usual “hug time” expires I feel Oliver attempt to step away, but I can’t let go. I’m clinging to him in some pathetic effort to stop time. If I move, the funeral will take place. Jack will move out. My dream of having a baby will never be realized. My life will go on and I’m not sure I can bear it.

Oliver obliges to spare my dignity and steps back in to the embrace. The side of his neck and his shag of dusty colored hair are a hideaway and I have no idea what’s come over me. I breathe in deep to get my wits back about me. I pull back from him enough to be face to face with him and to my own amazement I kiss him. Right on the mouth. What the hell?

“I’m so sorry,” I say, finally pulling away, my face hot with the inappropriateness of my actions.

OMG. I just kissed my dead father’s ex health care worker. BTW he’s completely gorgeous.

This of course will get numerous “likes” and comments of “you go girl” and “living vicariously, more details please.” And inevitably someone will respond with a “OMG, your father died! I’m so sorry” bringing it all back full circle.

I make one of those gestures people give by shaking their head and hands as if the movement can brush away the incident itself.

“Don’t worry about it,” Oliver says, looking me in the eye, making no return gesture of dismissal. “You’re sad. We’re sad too.”

I feel like I should explain myself, my marriage, it’s demise, how desperately I need companionship, how much I want a baby, how awkward I feel around my mother and how losing my Dad feels like I’ve been orphaned. How worried I am that my brother won’t come to the funeral. How embarrassed I am that I just kissed a stranger. And everything else that can’t possibly be voiced.

“Thank you,” I manage say, looking away from Oliver’s eyes and then back up again. “Do they train you guys on the right things to say? I’d like to compliment you to your supervisor.”

“No,” he says with a smile on his face. “I just know how you feel. Sort of.”

I sense a story there, but it’s not one that this relative stranger and I have time to share. He has work and I have everything that comes after this moment.

Oliver nods and I close the trunk over my father’s things.

F is for Funeral (don't worry-tomorrow something fun happens)

Excerpt from The Lemonade Year, finished novel seeking representation)

After the typical church service, back at Mom’s house, I watch the men pass around photos and talk about their families. One story from one man leads into the story from another, like a thin rope made of strong sinew, a wisp of something deeper than bone. I forget how hard a man can love. How desperate and irrational the heart can be. My father had been that quiet type of man whose issue of sincere emotion was a surprise. He was a jokester, a kid at heart, showing us his affection through play. But words often failed him. I had known that he loved us, of course, but hearing the stories told by other fathers around the mourning room brought the truth home to me. In the nursing home, how much had my father wanted to reach beyond the restraints of his own malfunctioning body to tell me himself? I tried to recall the small handful of times he had found words while he was there.


I see my brother, Ray, with his close cut, dark hair and three-day stubble, sitting in a folding chair in the corner by the back door. His ill-fitting, dark gray suit and starched white shirt hang on him like a costume. This is the suit he wore to court to cover his arms so thick with tattoos they appear as painted sleeves; the suit that attempted to make him look respectable and repentant. The suit that instead, especially today, makes him look like a book stuck on the wrong shelf.

What if all the restraint he had has been exhausted? What if this time, jail and the pain of a tattoo needle and his general helping of self loathing and beer can’t keep him from splitting down the middle?

I see Aunt Rose sauntering over to him and I try to push my way through the crowd. She’s talking loud enough to be heard halfway across the room and I know that she knows this.

Is it ok to back hand your at aunt at a funeral?

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“Well, Ray,” Aunt Rose says, her hands on her hips. “I almost didn’t recognize you. What did you think of the service or were you there?”

Damn her. I step over some kids coloring—all their little hues spread out around them.

“I sat in the back,” I hear Ray say.

Someone stops me to talk about something, but I’m listening to Ray. I’m so close, but stalled just feet away from him.

“I suppose you’re happy that your mother had him cremated,” Rose says.

“Why would that make me happy?” Ray asks and I can almost see what he wants to say forming in a cartoon thought bubble over his head. Fuck off, bitch. I loved my father.

You don’t have to get along with someone to love them. Love or the lack of it was never the issue between Ray and Dad. Love is the easy part. The life that surrounds it is was makes things hard.

“I guess you would have seen him off in a pine box anyway,” Rose says. “I wanted your mother to get one of the nice caskets. The kind with the plush felt. Stylish. But she decided to have him burned him up like a pile of old leaves that you want off your yard before they kill the grass.”

This is why no one likes her.

“Coffins are tacky,” Ray says. “They look like my sixth grade saxophone case.”

I think about the bright blue, plush lining where the instrument fits in—a perfect cut out to keep it snug in place for safe travel. I hope Dad has made it safe to where he's going.

E is for Endings

(Excerpt from The Lemonade Year, finished novel seeking representation)

When I get home, Jack is at the apartment clearing out the rest of his stuff. I give him his space as he boxes and bags the things he cares about enough to haul away with him. This particular part of a relationship’s demise is like a sick joke. You’ve done the yelling, the crying, the bargaining, the giving up. You’ve hired the lawyers and paid the fees, but now you have to hole up in the kitchen and chop vegetables for a dinner you’re not really going to make so that your disappearing other half can retain some dignity as he packs the last of his things in a cardboard box. Funny the way we attempt to fit life in a box.


This stage of it all happens in some twisted other celestial plain where things take much longer than they should and you feel like a royal ass for slicing carrots through the whole mess, but wouldn’t it be rude to offer to help. Let’s speed this up now, toss this in too, my potatoes are on boil, if you hurry it up you can be out of here before the biscuits are done.

“I think that’s it,” Jack says, coming into the kitchen and sitting at the barstool like he did on those rare occasions that he was home in time to catch me cooking as opposed to our usual routine of me eating alone and then nuking the remains for him when he got home.

“Ok then,” I say.

There is nothing to be said about this process. Nothing that makes it any better, that is. It’s too surreal to divvy everything up like children portioning out candy and counting the pieces to make sure each got their fair share. You take the couch and I’ll take the love seat and recliner. You take the bigger of the sauce pans and I’ll take those two little ones that you don’t like anyway. We each get two plates, two coffee mugs, two wine glasses, and two sets of silverware.

What I’ll do with that second place setting, I don’t know.

“Are you going with me to the thing,” I ask, feeling silly at my inability to say the word funeral out loud.

“I don’t think so,” Jack says, and swivels around, putting his back to me. “I just don’t feel like being the asshole all day.”

“Don’t you think not showing up will have the same effect?”

“Two totally different scenarios,” Jack says, and swivels back around on the barstool to face me. “One—I don’t go and your Aunt Rose asks you in that tone of hers why I’m not there, even though she knows good and well that we’re divorcing. You make some excuse for me, or you don’t and she tisk-tisks at you and goes on her merry way. People talk amongst themselves for a minute, but out of sight out of mind and I’m soon forgotten.”

“And scenario two?” I ask.

“Two,” he says, holding up two fingers for effect. “I go, and everyone leers at me all day because they know we’ve split and that I don’t belong there anymore and if I look at my watch or yawn or get up to piss, it will be an indication of my lack of sincerity and general jackassedness and they will talk about me behind their hands and rolls their eyes like I can’t fucking see them.”

I want to come back at him with some pithy something, but he’s right. Of course scenario two makes things difficult for him where as scenario one makes it hard on me. I could fire at him for that, but were the tables turned, I can’t honestly say that I would do any different. There’s no sense to torture him. Despite the end of our time together and the events that lead to it, I do love him. It’s almost never a lack of love that ends things. Now, your husband having sex with his receptionist and boss’s assistant and the girl at the drycleaners can drive a wedge however. Of course perhaps if said husband had been allowed to have rowdy sex with his wife, naked co-workers and clothes cleaners wouldn’t have entered into the picture at all.

C is for Call from Mom at Midnight

(Excerpt from The Lemonade Year, finished novel seeking representation/ fiction)

Mom is calling me after midnight. This isn’t good. I pour a glass of wine and answer the phone.

“I’m that woman again, Nina,” Mom says after perfunctory small talk, none of which address the time of night this call is occurring. “You know what I mean?”

“Not really,” I say and take my glass of false security out onto the balcony.

 “Back then,” Mom continues. “I was the only one of my friends to have kids. Everyone else was pursuing their career and I was home changing diapers.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I ask.

I know I sound like an ass. But the attitude is mostly just a cover-up.  I let high hopes fill a nursery, but had no baby to put in it. Hearing people talk about the trials of motherhood is just salt in the wound.  Mom keeps sprinkling it in.

“I’d see the women in their fancy business suits and smart high-heel shoes buying exotic foods at the grocery,” Mom continues, oblivious to me. “They’d be carrying around that little basket that says I don’t need to know what I’m eating next Tuesday because that’s Jennifer’s birthday and we’re all going downtown to celebrate.”

She says that last part in a fake female voice and I almost laugh at the ridiculousness of a woman faking a woman’s voice.

“I used to be one of them and they knew it,” Mom says recalling a time before I can remember. “But I became a woman with a child, with spit up on her shoulder, with a grocery cart piled for two weeks, because, let’s face it, who knew when I’d get it together enough to go out into the world again to shop for the necessities of life, never mind going downtown to celebrate with whomever Jennifer may be.”

I picture Mom in her kitchen, she’s animated. Waving her arms as much as the constraints of holding the phone will allow.

“Is it so wrong?” Mom asks. “That when the three of you were finally asleep for the night, I’d make myself a drink. Maybe a Cosmo, or a martini, a margarita—and pretend that I had something to celebrate too?”

It’s then that I hear the tinkle of ice in a glass from the other side of the phone line.

“Mom,” I say, but am unable to follow it up.

I can’t ask her to be careful. I can’t preach to her about self-medication with alcohol. I know she knows that she shouldn’t open that door again, but Dad is dead. Thursday is the funeral. I take another sip too.


“Who knows,” Mom says and I feel the end of the conversation coming. “Maybe in this day and age, I wouldn’t have felt so out of touch. People have their texting and tweeting—whatever that is—their Spacebook to let the whole world know that they just did a thousand sit-ups, or that their cat just ate a crayon, or that little Emily has a fever of a hundred and one.”

“Facebook,” I say.

“What?” she says but keeps talking.

 

I hear her voice but my attention wanders. She might be right. Maybe if she had some connection to the multitude of people she once knew and all the people they once knew then perhaps she could have posted on her wall My youngest child, Lola, was just in a horrible car accident and if she lives, she may never walk again. And btw, she has some kind of brain damage that the doctor called the “Swiss Cheese Effect” and I could just punch him in the face WTF.

And people could reply OMG, Cecilia, how awful.

Hang in there.

We love you.

Or perhaps people could “like” her statement, thus validating her outrage and letting her know that they had at least taken the time out of their beautiful life to read her message to the cosmos and click on the little thumb before hoping to a link of a YouTube video of man peeling potatoes and singing the Star Spangled Banner.

 

B is for Box of Tissues, Bottle of Wine and Bird Wings

(Excerpt from The Lemonade Year finished novel seeking representation)

When someone buys two dozen lemons, a box of tissues, and a bottle of wine at midnight, you have to figure something is wrong. The wine is for the minute I walk in my apartment. The tissues are for my father’s funeral. The lemons mean I’m losing my job.  

I’m a food stylist and photographer. One of those people who artistically arranges food and then takes pictures of it. The pictures that make it look like the best damn cheeseburger or almond crusted salmon with blanched baby asparagus that ever was. The pictures that are meant to inspire you to cook, despite the knowledge that you’ll never be able to recreate the dish the way it appears in the book—yeah, that’s what I do. I make it all seem possible.

It’s a ruse.

Right now my publishing house has me working on 32 Ways to Make Lemonade. I think my job may be in jeopardy. But right now I don’t have time to worry about that. It’s past midnight and I’m driving home from the grocery store with a bottle of wine strapped down by the seatbelt on the passenger’s side and there’s a white owl standing in the middle of the road. I get closer and closer and all the bird does is swivel its head around like that kid in the Exorcist and stare at me. I start slowing down, sure that at any moment the bird will lift off like it’s capable of doing. But it doesn’t. I fish-tale to a halt, leaning over the stirring wheel, watching as the front end of the car passes over the owl until he’s out of sight.

I sit there gripping the wheel. Alone on the highway, nearly forty years old, my marriage over, my long fought over career slipping through my fingers, and my father’s funeral two days away. But here I am panicked over the possibility that there may be a dead owl on the grill of my car. So far—so far—I’ve been holding it together. But something about a dead bird with its little hollow bird bones broken against the front of my car breaks me.

I push open the car door in a panic, like I can get there in time to give the little thing mouth to beak and he’ll be ok—he’ll be ok. It’s all my fault. I should have just kept driving and perhaps the car would have just passed over him as he stood there in the middle of the freaking road, but I slammed on breaks and that made the front end go lower, like I was aiming for him for crying out loud. Bitch, I hear him say to me, can’t a bird stand in the street anymore. What’s the world coming to?

I slam my door and wheel around to the front of the car. It’s late at night and I’m on a back road, but still a car screams past me in the other lane and I shudder. My headlights are blazing and I expect to find the owl crushed against the grill, wings spread—trying to take off in the last seconds—to no avail. But there’s nothing. I should be thrilled, but panic sets in deeper. Where did he go? Is he under a tire? Is there still time. Can I save him? I kneel down on the pavement to get a look under the car. Then whoosh—up from beneath the bumper the owl rises and zig zags off—its wings clipping the hood on the way up and off into the black sky—a fluttering white speck headed for the safety of the trees. I sit down in the wash of my own headlights and cry.

Taking the Challenge! A-Z

April is the A-Z Blogging Challenge. Every day in April (except for Sundays) you're supposed to write a blog post with the theme of, you got it, the alphabet. Today is A.

If you go back and read some old posts you'll see that for the most part, I talk about the joys and trials of writing and offer contest info and other links and so forth. For this challenge I'm going to stop talking about writing and post some actual writing. 

My women's fiction novel, The Lemonade Year, is currently open for representation and critique. Thanks for reading!


A: Addled

On the day my father died, the lady sitting next to me at the café across the street from my office had two bites of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich left on her plate. One of the bites had no bacon. The tomatoes were too ripe and the lettuce was the pale green color of giving up.

When the charge nurse called, I excused myself from a lunch with coworkers, saying I needed to get back to the office—that something was wrong with the layout they need to speak to me.

“Who?” the nosey junior copy-editor whose name I can’t recall questioned. “I thought you were working on the lemonade thing. That’s miles from press.”

I’m not a very good liar on the spot.

“No,” I said, standing up, trying like hell to get out of there. “The other one.”

There is no other one. For a while they’ve had me doing “more office admin and graphic design duties” which I know is just smoke up my ass. They haven’t acquired anything new in a while. All we’re doing is catching up on commitments. In my department, this lemonade thing is the bottom of the barrel.  I should have freelanced, but I took the staff position because of the security.

There is no security. And the news in my ear that father had passed was proof of that.

I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready. Not ready.

Like a mantra that will do no good, the words flooded my brain. Who is ever ready? Even through long illness and certain inevitable demise, the heart still hopes, like a child, still believes in magic.

Addled, I left without paying my bill at the bacon, lettuce and over-ripe tomato café. I sent a text to Suzanne to apologize for leaving her with the nosey copy editor and my check. She wrote back to ask if I was ok. I tried to reply, but the whole process of written telephone communication via a handheld device capable of technological tasks of all imagination seemed suddenly ridiculous to me. Everything seemed ridiculous. As if all the effort to create plasma TV screens, three-D everything, cars that can parallel park themselves, phones that can video chat while surfing the net and washing your dog, was just a distraction from the fact that none of it can make you immortal. It’s all smoke and mirrors to hide the knowledge that your heart can still break, you eyes can still cry, and the people you love will leave you.