Reader, I Married Him

Five years ago this week, on a frigid night in Flint, I got take out shrimp from a Chinese place, ate it alone in my high-ceilinged lonely apartment, and went to bed feeling isolated and depressed. At 4 a.m. I jolted awake in a panic, my heart wildly racing, my neck burning, my arms tingling, my legs cramping, and my stomach nauseous. Desperate and afraid, I got up, walked around and around the wooden floors in my stocking feet. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. I didn't want to die alone. I forced myself to get dressed and drove myself on a snowy, icy freeway to Genesys Hospital, where I stayed for two days for tests and more tests, until they finally assured me that it was not a heart attack and sent me home, shaken but relieved.

I remembered this anniversary of sorts Sunday night when I watched the last half of the new Masterpiece Theater version of Jane Eyre. I remembered that Jane Eyre, my 2002 panic attack and my own Rochester, the man I married in 2005, are all tied together. On the way home from work tonight, a full moon glowed overhead and I could swear there was a full moon that week, too, one I could see from my hospital bed in the cardiac unit. I remembered I'd been reading Jane Eyre that winter, and I thought I remembered that I had written notes in it as I'd waited anxiously for one test after another in the hospital. At home, I rummaged from room to room. I really wanted to find the book. I wanted to reflect on that terrifying moment of my body's fragility, and what I might have noted about it. And I finally did-- find Jane Eyre, that is, pushed behind some old CDs in a downstairs shelf.

The semester had just begun and I was teaching Women's Lit for the first time, replacing a professor who was on sabbatical. I had left my husband of 15 years the previous spring, and that first long winter was rough. We were all still reeling from 9/11, of course, and on top of everything I was in the throes of a turbulent, mercurial menopause. Everything was hitting me hard. I was 52 years old and it seemed hopelessly improbable that I could begin again. There was too much history. Who did I think I was, starting over? Yet there I was, having wrenched myself from one life and thrown myself into another.

I adopted Professor Zeff's syllabus as she had always taught it, without changing a thing, and there at the top of the reading list was Jane Eyre. I'd read it in college 30 years before, but never since. So I was madly reading it again, trying to keep ahead of my students, the 50 or so women and three men staring back at me as I reported in each day from what felt like a fabulously irrational new life. I had reconnected with an old friend from Peace Corps, a man I hadn't seen for 25 years, and he'd been flying in to Flint from LA to see me about once a month. I loved him, but it seemed impossible to plunge into a new life with him so hard on the demise of my old. I was still in deep mourning for the death of the dream of my marriage. I could only think of what was lost. But when Ted came to visit, sometimes I began to forget the grief and let in a little pleasure. We connected physically, and I was startled and amazed.

When I set off for the hospital that night, gripping the wheel and expecting to be attacked by pain all the way, part of me was still planning to show up for class the next day, and so I had tucked my copy of Jane Eyre into my purse. Inside it now, there is still a folded menu from one of my hospital meals -- it says "fruit cocktail/jello/dry creamer/decaf coffee/whipped potatoes/hot beef sandwich/carrots/no salt." On it I wrote, "Hospital food really is nasty, still we eat it because we're hungry." By we, apparently I meant me and Rita, in the next bed over, whom I wrote was "impossibly frail with a mastectomy on the left side from the same year her husband died." I cried when she told me. She, too, thought that she was having a heart attack, and in her case, she was right.

I kept going back to Jane Eyre. "What good it would have done me at that time," Jane writes, returning to Thornfield after her first dramatic encounter with Mr. Rochester in the moors, "to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined." I wrote on the menu, "smiley faces everywhere. Darling, honey, kiddo." There was a National Geographic with an article about the aurora borealis. I found it comforting. And a ten-year-old issue of Prevention Magazine on the windowsill.

Eventually, of course, Jane falls in love and after she first touches Rochester and he clings to her hand, she goes back to her room "tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea," intensely sensing a "freshening gale, wakened by hope." I'm not sure how far I read in the novel those two nights at Genesys, but I know that the book gave me hope. I began to believe that whatever time was left in my life, it was good -- this passion I had, to begin again in love.

From California, crazy with worry, Ted finally found out where I was and called my hospital room. "Why didn't you tell me what was going on?" he demanded, crazily angry that I had left him out. "I want to come out there. Do you want me to come?" I wasn't sure I could ask anything of him, nor sure if I wanted to. Or dared to. But I knew I'd just terrified myself and I was afraid of being alone. "I want you to come," I finally said, and the next day, there he was, hugging me back to life in my apartment, the old radiators chugging out noisy heat. That weekend I let him take care of me. That first night when we snuggled into bed, he put his arms around me and whispered, "Were you afraid?" And when I said yes and finally gave in to tears, thoroughly and unapologetically in the moment, with its terror and joy, I knew something big was happening -- to me, and to us. Things were different between us from that moment on.

And my beloved copy of Jane Eyre, with the page predominantly earmarked where she announces, "Reader, I married him," is here in front of me now, a cherished artifact of starting over, of a sea change, of a molting that has been the biggest and most wonderful surprise of my life. Early Happy Valentine's Day to you all.

"Rogues, Desperados and Cutthroats"

Participating for three hours in a mass group booksigning at Barnes and Noble Saturday somehow reminded me of the weddings arranged by Sun Myung Moon: everybody hoping for the perfect match, but knowing it would be provided by somebody else, a god figure who meant us well. (I'm an agnostic who thinks there's nothing wrong with magical thinking -- go figure.) There were 12 of us lined up at tables at the front of the store, each supplied with a Sharpie, a pile of our "product," a glass of ice water from the cafe, and, of course, our respective hungry looks and desperate hopes. I was dreading it; I'd had lunch at the mall's Ruby Tuesday with my dear friend Professor Teddy beforehand, loading up on appropriately healthy food (grilled chicken salad) and yielding at the last minute to a limey Kamikaze from the bar.

I knew a couple of the other authors -- for one, the gregariously satirical Andy Heller ("Come Heller High Water") and Tom Powers, the retired Flint Public Library research librarian who'd been the demented brain behind the rowdy Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest for which my former husband and I served as judges for years. Also in the lineup was a romance novelist (selling her 11th book -- impressive -- I bought the big type edition for a mere $4.95) a vampire novelist (sexy and predictably ebony-haired), a historian, a self-help writing neurologist, two children's authors, and a manly adventure novelist whose fans lined up the whole time.

My friends materialized and I sold 10 books -- apparently not a bad result, three per hour. If I did that well on Amazon I'd be doing a hell of a lot better than this morning's depressing sales rank of 641,000 -- but then, we're not supposed to obsess about such things, are we? I was the only author there visited by TWO sets of twins, and adorable ones at that, the boys of Jake and Helen Blumner and the girls of Dave and Jen Larsen.

This is my first novel, and I'm trying to learn post-publishing etiquette. Being a poet most of my writing life, I conscientiously walked the gauntlet buying the other authors' books and requesting their autographs. I'd brought extra money just for that. It's the way I've been "brought up," so to speak -- poets are supposed to support each other. We're always talking about "the writing community" and how we have to stick together. We know nobody reads us; we're lucky if other poets read our slim volumes. Nonetheless, we make our friendly gestures; we do what we can. In poetry, of course, there isn't enough influence, power or money to go around, and there'd NEVER be a 12-poet lineup at any Barnes and Noble. Here's the thing, though: not one of those authors on Saturday bought mine. What's wrong with these people? Who's their mother? I went home feeling peevish and wounded.

That night I was depressed and keyed up, and, the temperature outside plunging to a life-threatening 9 degrees, I snuggled into bed early. But I but couldn't sleep. So I reached for Tom Powers' exuberantly colorful 2002 book "Michigan Rogues, Desperadoes, Cuthroats." I immediately felt better. He says P.K. Small, "the Ogre of Seney," became a "gastronomic adventurer" who, for the promise of a drink, would 'gulp down horse manure, either fresh and still steaming, or as a tooth-busting, dried up horse apple." And here's my favorite -- Powers describes T.C. Cunyan, "the Man Eater of Peterborough" like this: "short, squat and tough, he looked like a 170-pound piece of gristle." I still laugh every time I read this amazing sentence.
So I'm grateful to Tom Powers for saving me from middle-of-the-night novelist angst. At least I didn't have to eat horseshit, and even though I heard a major brawl broke out somewhere in the mall just an hour after all of us literati had packed up our Sharpies and left, I understand that the world I'm in is basically benign.

Sado-Masochism and the Screaming Child

I spent two hours of MLK Day sitting in the dentist's chair. Well, wait, it's not really the dentist's chair because HE'S never in the chair and, for that matter, neither is my dominatrix hygienist of the day, Rose. It was sort of an accident -- my appointment wasn't until weeks later and when I called to change an 8 a.m. appointment to a more civilized hour, they tricked me into accepting a cancellation for that very afternoon -- a rare day off.

No matter what I do they always yell at me. Except for Kathy, that is, my favorite hygienist, who had bought my novel and leaned around the corner into Rose's cubicle to dish about the book. "I wish I'd had a life like that," Kathy said, while I drooled from the godawful banana-flavored numbing cream Rose had just q-tipped onto my gums. Damn that stuff is bitter. "I wish I'd had that much fun."

"Issha novel," I garbled, "made moshtovitup."

"Yeah, I'm not buying that," Kathy said. Maybe she needs to believe it really is possible to have a life like that. Maybe that's why nobody wants fiction anymore. Everybody wants to believe everything can happen. That's okay, most of my novel actually is true anyway -- or some timeworn version of "true" -- and I did have a hell of a lot of interesting adventures when I was in my twenties.

Anyway, apparently I have a small mouth, my teeth all crowded together in there, and that's why I'm always on the precipice of periodontal disease. When I get Kathy, she's kind to me, and that's why I always try to get her, but the last time, after she finished, the mean dentist came in and said I needed to come back three days later because Kathy hadn't gotten all the plaque off. I accepted the appointment but when I got home I called right away and cancelled it. They get me two hours every four or six months, and that's it. I like Kathy.

So I swear they gave me Rose on MLK Day to get even. She's funny and wry and I secretly like her -- I've been hearing about her kids and stuff for about 15 years -- but she's relentless. This time she insisted on sticking cardboard hell into my mouth for xrays, the heavy vest pushing against my heart and my throat gagging while she dashed away for each print. And then she started the cleaning with that sonic thingie that makes me feel like I'm being waterboarded.

Well, even with that I was holding my own reasonably well, concentrating on the oldies songs on CARS 108 and trying to get a peek at paltry snowflakes drizzling onto a little pine I always watch outside Rose's window. Then this kid arrived in the next cubicle over, and as soon as he got into the chair, he started shrieking. It went on through the eight needle pricks Rose administered to numb my wussy upper gums, it went on through all four of my quadrants, and it went on even through the cherry-flavored polishing.

"Wha ish it? Gwatanamo ovrthere?" I sputtered. "Hey, kid, don't give up the sheecrets!" Rose giggled and told me to suction. She said my gums were bleeding even though I floss every night and I've even switched to a buzzing electric toothbrush.

The kid shrieked some more.

"Theyshoogashim," I said.

"They're trying," Rose said. "He won't breathe in." He was eight, she said, and he does that every time.

Eventually the kid got done and I got done. The mean dentist, who's really not mean, came in and felt up my neck for tumors and shit and checked my gums, declaring me cavity and plaque-free. I asked him why he was running Abu Ghraib in Flushing, Michigan and he didn't laugh. I thought I was quite hilarious. Neil Diamond was warbling "Sweet Caroline" when I finally clambered out of the chair and got my free toothbrush and dental floss. When I went out to pay my bill the kid was playing with Legos in the waiting room, his hair askew but his face almost disturbingly calm. He wasn't making a sound. His brother was next in the chair, and Rose told me he never fights in the slightest.

Poetry Church

Spent a Friday night at a little bookstore in Flint listening to and watching Traci Currie, a UM - Flint instructor and poet, deliver her goods. It was sweet. Such soothing pleasure. Just a circle of about 15 people in comfortable chairs, and the bumpy, polished wooden floors, and the Art Deco arched windows, and dark falling out on Second Street, and a little table with snacks and wine waiting for us, and a few people walking by outside, and Traci passionately speaking. After a frenetic first week of the semester, Traci's human voice was brave and refreshing.

Part of the comfort for me was the purity and simplicity of the situation: no cell phones, no TV, no email, no pixels. Just a circle of people listening, and Traci there giving us her all. The power of a single human voice, singing out.

I spent a lot of my childhood in circles like that: in Bible studies and prayer meetings in places like Calvary EUB church on Gibbs Avenue in Canton, Ohio, and later, memorably, in Blissfield and Nellie, Ohio, plucky, struggling little churches in Coshocton County. My mind and heart learned to receive and respond in those evenings of scripture and talk. Even when I was a child, the people in those gatherings welcomed me in and let me speak if I wanted to. I remember those people as kind and gentle. I loved their stories. It was never only about the words, but about the meanings of the words, and what we all thought about them. I have the poetry and rhythms of the flawed but addictively lovely King James Bible in my bones, and a fondness for the dear folk who sat around those circles. after hard days in not always happy lives, struggling to find grace and insight in The Word. That hope, centered in language, is still deeply embedded in who I am. The hope that language might be able to save us. Or at least, profoundly please us.

Now, I usually eschew traditional church. But I find the same comfort in Poetry Church, in rooms where remarkable regular people offer up their words, and where language still sometimes delivers startling grandeur and grace.

Writing into an Unknown Silence

This is a peculiar feeling: writing into a large electronic balloon, where my words are like molecules circulating and bumping up against billions of other molecules. Since I'm not getting any comments, I wonder if I could write virtually anything and virtually no one would notice. An interesting take on audience: there could be somebody out there, or maybe no one. Sort of like God.

I'm thinking about how I used to write. I have the gift of one specific moment when something became clear to me. I was about 14 and we were living in a rickety parsonage in Blissfield, Ohio. I was often alone in that time of my life, and it was a condition which did not upset me -- I liked the possibilities within my solitude. Anyway, I was sitting at a little desk on the second floor of the house, and I remember a milky daylight filtering in a window to my left. I was writing in a notebook. I never called it a diary -- diaries were for more trivial pursuits, I suppose I thought. Anyway, a moment surged up in which I said to myself, "I want to write. I want to be a writer." I was so sure that was what I wanted to do that a brief, euphoric ecstasy washed over me.

I've never made it "big" and my life has taken many twists and turns: I have not had the intense focus required, probably, to make this my only life's work. I'm not the best there is and even now, as I feel my age nick away at my energies, I feel unrealized and in need of more practice. But by far it is the clearest and most consistent professional moment of my life, and it was exhilarating.

RIP James Brown

Woke up to the news on Christmas morning and couldn't stop crying for about an hour.
My first husband and I, still young and full of hope, used to rate our dinner parties by whether we ended up rolling up the living room carpet and dancing to the Godfather of Soul.
If I was still in Tonga I'd put on my biggest, messiest mourning mats and wear black for a month. I don't feel good. I'm woebegone. dejected, doleful. I'm down.
And it's sadly, irrevocably official now: my youth is over.

Happy Holiday Doubt in the Pedro Sun

Christmas Eve in San Pedro -- the day awash with that energizing California sun streaming in through the bedroom drapes, getting in my husband's eyes as we roll over and click on the morning talk shows. Out here, Stephanopoulos and Russert start at 8 a.m. and I love lolling on the bed, what's left of the beleaguered LA Times splayed around me on the comforter. I can alternately watch Meet the Press, read the paper, stare out at the harbor and sip coffee reheated from last night's dinner party in big red Christmas mugs. What languid and lovely multitasking!

In the "Current" section, my husband finds something he wants to read out loud, an article about the myths of atheism, while that bountiful Christian communitarian, Rev. Rick Warren, robust and at ease in his tie-less pinstriped shirt allows as how he can be pro-life evangelical and an AIDs activist; "being sick is not a sin," an inserted box quoting his wife Kay reassuringly reminds us.

"I'm starting to like this guy," I say. He's easier to watch than Joel Osteen, that glazed-looking evangelical cyborg whose Christian smile looks botoxed and demented. We debate whether Rick Warren or Mitch Albom is richer, and I figure it'd be a close call, what with Albom's adorably heaven-heavy oeuvre. We reflect on Barbara Walters's special on heaven and how it seems to us people believe in heaven because they hope they'll get to see a lost loved one again. We both find that poignant, if delusional.

So my husband picks up the LA Times again and reads, "Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse," Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason contends. Under Myth #2 -- "Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history" -- he argues, "There is no society in history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

Oh, music to my Christmas Eve ears. I come from Quaker forebears, folks who got run out of England and then Nantucket and then South Carolina because of their religion, and I grew up in a passionately fervant Christian home, so appreciation of freedom of religion is deep in my bones. This history is also part of my own passionate suspicion of the mischief religion propagates on nonbelievers; I'm one of them. As an adult I am much more comfortable with reverent doubt and not-knowing. I agree with Harris's view, under "Atheists are arrogant," "When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance, it is intellectual honesty."

Well, I'm happy in my nonbelief. This time of year I like to play one of my personal Christmas carols, Randy Newman's "God's Song." I can't resist quoting it here:

"Lord, if you won't take care of us
Won't you please please let us be?"

to which God replies:

"You must all be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why i love mankind
You really need me
That's why i love mankind."

Anyway, eventually my husband and I clambered out of bed and clicked off the tube and went out for a walk in Pt. Fermin Park and breakfast overlooking the marina at 22nd Street Landing, The sheer beauty of our surroundings seemed to still our impulse to cogitate. As Harris asserts, "from the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation." Indeed. Evidence of this still gorgeous, if troubled, earth is all around me this day before Christmas, and it is sufficient.

A Kamikaze at Tiny's

Jimmy is back from Texas: I ran into him today at that famous newstand at the corner of Las Palmas and Hollywood Boulevard.

I made him buy a copy of my novel from the trunk of my husband's car. It's $17.95 and I didn't have change for Jimmy's twenty, so I took it and told him I'd buy him a drink at Musso and Frank's. It was a perfect day in Hollywood -- low sixties, that bright California sun. It was only a block or two to Musso and Frank's and, freshly arrived from other places, we were both squinting in the sunlight. Then Jimmy decided he wanted to move his rental car so we climbed in and drove two blocks to some parking garage where he could leave the thing for two bucks. Jimmy knows the meter maids of Hollywood well and he knows when they want to be bitchy there's no compromise.

Jimmy used to run a barbershop on Las Palmas right next to my husband's awards and trophy store. I used to bring in a bottle of decent champagne every time I'd come into town and sit over in the barbershop because they had air conditioning and drink champagne with Jimmy until my husband got a break to take me to lunch. When Jimmy'd see me coming he'd holler out, "How's your pussy??" and I'd yell back "Satisfied." Mostly queens or lonely has beens came to get their hair done, including one guy who looked exactly like Humphrey Bogart and actually made his living doing standins. I always tried to get him to have some champagne but he would never take any. Once I brought in my CD of Elvis Costello and the Fairfield Four, a beautiful collection; Jimmy loves get down gospel sounds.

Jimmy's partner was Bobby, a tough little Latino who always wore black and had a black pompadour and lots of bling and who shot himself in the head out in his house in the Valley, hooked on too much Vicodin and despairing, we all thought, of his double life. Out there he had a wife and kids; in Hollywood it was a little different. After Bobby died Jimmy held on for about three years but finally decided to go to Texas to start a new life near his aged mother and her retired oil-business boyfriend. Jimmy thought the landscape, the fresh air of Texas might do him good. But after a year he was homesick and without work; he needed a license he didn't have and he didn't want to stick around and sit in class all day. His mom bought him a George Strait double album, thinking it might help, but while Jimmy says he liked a cut or two he really couldn't get into it. So he came back. He's always been a Hollywood queen, he'd tell you -- his father worked for Warner Brothers and he's got the place in his blood. And so here we were, coming at Musso and Frank's from the parking structure thirsty for something strong.

But we forgot Musso and Frank's is closed on Mondays: their ornate iron grate was solidly pulled closed and locked for the day. Jimmy thought he knew of another place, but when we got there, it wasn't open either; a black-clad waitress smoking on the sidewalk said we'd have to wait till 4, but we wanted our cocktails now. "Try Tiny's," she said, pointing back to the Boulevard. Motivated by thirst, we trekked past Cahuenga and found the little storefront with white marquis lights circling a square sign: Tiny's.

After our eyes adjusted to the dark interior, somebody yelled, "How can I help you" but there was nobody but us and a couple of deep red booths, an enormous wooden bar with a classic "bar nude" over the mirror; finally the bartender stood up from putting bottles in the frig so we could see where the voice was coming from.

We clambered onto the barstools and ordered: a double-olive martini for Jimmy and a kamikaze for me. Jimmy's favorite words are fucking and pussy and you know if you're sitting down for drinks with him you'll get an earful. He's about the happiest guy I know, though, especially his third day back in Hollywood, and when he slings the blue it's out of exuberance. The bartender was unfazed; eventually he told us every item in the place got bought off EBay, including the massive bar from some old drinkery in South Chicago. The drinks were excellent and we toasted to Jimmy's mother and Hollywood, and threw in another one for Bobby, may he rest in peace. Jimmy likes to talk about beauty -- and how it seems to be rapidly fleeing. I said Jimmy, what are you about 37? and he said, yeah, on one side! He said he used to spend hundreds on Lancome and the like, but they never worked. Now, he said, he uses Jergens, the one with the pink top, $3.99 from Walmart -- the same stuff his mother's been using for 50 years -- and he says it's just as good. I pledged to try it, but quoted WCWilliams, "Ach, we were all beautiful once" and told Jimmy in my view we'd just have to get used to getting old.

Anyway, I spent most of the money Jimmy gave me for the book on the drinks and left the rest for the bartender. It was bright outside, even brighter than when we went in, and even with those delicious drinks coursing through our bloodstream, nothing looked all that much better on the Boulevard. But it's fun to have Jimmy back, and fun to be back myself, finding a bar named "Tiny's" on a sunny December day just before the solstice.

Back to the Coast

I live a double life. In one life, I get up into a gray dawn in a gray post-industrial city and this time of year, facing east, stare out at bare branches and the slim chance of a streak of sun before lake effect overcast takes over. I plod in to teach at my university and hope there's still a cup of coffee left in the office carafe so I don't have to make it. I methodically turn on my computer in my windowless office, consult the syllabus I optimistically crafted in balmier times and get ready for class...I am structured and orchestrated and choreographed and responsible and, and, and...

In my other life, I wake up facing southeast over the LA Harbor and make green tea and get the LA Times off the street that slants sharply down toward Fort MacArthur with its big green commons and red roofs and beyond that, marinas full of little yachts and massive concrete slips for container ships from China and Japan. In this life, the colors are emerald and azure and white and red. From our bedroom, my husband and I see two graceful palms and sometimes parrots perch and squawk there. At night we sometimes hear seals bark down in the rocks. I dawdle and write and look out to sea and sometimes I do nothing.

So tomorrow I fly out of the gray and into the blue to sweet California, where my husband waits and my body stretches out in the tangy sea air. Even thinking about it now, my bag packed, the violets watered and the bills paid, I feel myself slow down. I'm grateful for the unbending, the opening up, the way I feel renewed in my coastal life. I'm grateful for the world that lets this be: the privilege of this fertility, this gentle turning, this balance.

The Dagger of Plagiarism

It's an unglamorous, gray day in Flint, the atmosphere made all the more oppressive by mountains of grading. This is when being a writing teacher is hardest: I miss the daily sparkle of the students in person now that classes are over, and what I'm left with are their complicated, convoluted struggles to communicate with me on the page. I'm doing a lot of my grading online now: at least, I can settle down with a cup of green tea, in my sweats, and click and comment on my amiable MAC while looking out the window at the leafless black trees -- this time of year, they look arthritic and when a wind comes up from the west, you can almost hear them creak.

So, I swear, the FIRST paper I open doesn't feel right. Doesn't read right. A few clicks on Google later and I realize, yes, it's happened again: A student who would have gotten a B otherwise gave me a paper cut-and-pasted from sources easily accessible on Google. So he flunks the paper and flunks the class.

When I told my colleague about it later, at school, she says, "It feels like a dagger." We both use knife-wound images as we vent. Like my neighbors parking their white van in front of the house, this is an odd crime -- is anyone really hurt? In a world so full of actual bloodshed, how dare we two teachers, leaning against our doorposts on a gloomy Wednesday afternoon, claim injury from a student's awkwardly stolen words? Let's take a moment to breathe: let's acknowledge, with all due respect, a sense of proportion. If my life was at stake, or the student's, probably I wouldn't give a damn.

But why, when my colleague and I are talking about it, do we simultaneously, instinctively, bring our hands to our chests as if to protect our hearts?

It is because we love words and believe in their power beyond all reason. Words are my Word, my lifeblood and my pride.

My colleague tells me she is training herself not to take it personally. I've been teaching far longer than her but I still struggle every time. It feels like a dagger: a dagger of betrayal and disrespect. In my response to my student, after he'd at first denied it, then admitted it and asked for mercy, I wrote in a flood of emotion: " I feel personally offended. I do not see this as a negotiable item, and I am very angry about it at the moment. I'm not in a good place for any sort of compromise, and because this is something I take VERY seriously, I don't think you'll get anywhere with me." I was sorry afterwards that I'd let myself be so raw. The next, and final, message was crisp and cold and governed entirely by the language of rules.

My colleague says it's really NOT personal. I know that. The student's just trying to get by: plagiarism happens out of laziness and the press of deadlines, and, I suspect, our students' understanding that we really, truly love the shining paragraphs, not the bland and mediocre and confusing ones that are the students' messy results much of the time. I think our students want us to love them, and if we haven't taught them enough to pave the way for those golden sentences that will make us love them, maybe they just want to find the ones that will. Maybe I'm crazy because I just got home from the office Christmas party and had a little bit of the de rigueur holiday egg nog -- the heavily frothed brew redolent with secret dollops of whiskey that everyone denies are there. I must have had too much, yes, that's it. Because if there's any truth to my half-baked theory, then plagiarism is about the failure of love. And that's a damned depressing thought on this dark, unredeemable midweek night.

Out of the Cold

I'm attempting to rediscover this little blog. My new novel, not coincidentally, is called Night Blind. To find out more, go to my website, www.janworth.com. Yep, that's me.
I've been thinking I had a few things to say about publishing a novel. So I'll see if I can get this going again.
And it's not just that, but the opportunity to try to move beyond the book, to write something new.
So here goes nothing!

Fortune Cookie

Well I was out in California with my boyfriend when my ex emailed me that he was having a party, and would I come along with everybody else in what I’ve taken to calling our tribe, the tribe that shifted like a piece of flaky shale after our divorce, even though everybody kept trying to act like everything was the same but really it wasn’t, and then finally one by one people would drink a little bit too much at some party and say, “It’s not the way it used to be” and I’d shift from one foot to the other and feel guilty, because I thought I might have started it all. My ex suggested that we all bring a gift for his new girlfriend who just got accepted into some master’s program, and we would celebrate that and the new paint job (plum, school bus yellow, rust red) in the rooms of the house where my ex and I got married in what I’d have to say was a sweet event even back when the walls were ivory and cream.

Then later he wrote to me again and asked me not to come.

Something about her mother being there and how you couldn’t expect an 83-year-old to understand.

I didn’t tell anybody else in the tribe that I had been disinvited. Back home from California, alone that Friday night, I decided I would party by myself. I was in a dangerous mood, bound to prove I could be just fine on my own. I told myself I wanted to be alone. I wanted carry-out Chinese: there’s something about those generous little white boxes, the piles of rice, the feel of the sticks on the teeth, the clean taste of the delicate wood. I went to a place I hadn’t been to since we split up, Young Sing, on the grimy East Side.

I used to go there with him – there first, then the movie store. It was how we spent our Friday nights. But now I felt like a female Frankenstein, walking in, awkward, clunky. I wanted to order what I always used to order, but I couldn’t think of the name of the dish, the way to ask for those crunchy noodles. I used to get them here, there used to be a woman who spoke English behind the glass window who knew what I liked. Where was she now? Confused and startled that my mind would not help me remember the name of that dish, those noodles, I sputtered, oh, okay, just give me beef and broccoli. I didn’t want to act like I had to buy my Chinese food from some American to get it right, and I sure didn’t want to make their Friday night harder by not knowing what I wanted, but I did want something. But what were those crunchy noodles called? I was struggling, fumbling one more time to explain myself.

I sat down at a cold linoleum table to try to find what it was I wanted on the menu. Surely it would pop out at me, but it was if it had disappeared, a star that used to be in the sky but wasn’t anymore, a mystery. I felt crazy and upset. Two black women were eating mu shu at the next table, talking about work, their lousy boss who’s going through menopause. They looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.

I want the crunchy noodles, I said one more time. Then, finally, a spark: It’s the Cantonese-style chicken chow mein. That’s what I want.

Crunchy, then, the Chinese woman said, visibly rolling her eyes at the Chinese man in the hot kitchen behind. Or did I just think she did? Forget the beef and broccoli? Just the Cantonese-style chow mein, then? No beef and broccoli?

That’s it, Cantonese-style chow mein, I said with relief. That was the dish I always used to get. The black women wiped the corners of their mouths delicately and re-applied their makeup. They both had earthy bodies and they were dressed in their work clothes and they looked great, comfortable in their curves and big earrings and their beautiful fancy round hairdos. They seemed like old friends, relaxing after a hard week. They seemed competent and spunky. I was envious of their obvious ease. I was in my grey sweat pants and a tan sweatshirt and I realized there was a spot of something on it, right between the breasts, as if something had dribbled off my chin. My hair kept falling into my eyes.

So I waited.

On the table, an April 1993 New Yorker. A Donna Tartt story about a child actor, now grown, who had to visit kids at a cancer hospital. I thought this was the same New Yorker that had always been here, all those times I came with my husband, the one single New Yorker, as worn at the edges as it had ever been, but not particularly more so. What was a New Yorker doing here, anyway, in this shabby neighborhood where half the girls are fast and the other half are pregnant with their second kids and they’re not even 21? Knife fights and drive-by shootings around here hit the papers every Sunday morning; not long ago one teenage twin thrill-killed the other in somebody’s basement.

Right down the street was Angelo’s, a local coney joint where they once had to close the place down because of a grease fire. I once took my new boyfriend when he was here from California, and I wanted him to see how campy it was and to savor along with me the local color, the tattooed guys and the senior citizens with oily pony tails and the waitresses biting their pencils and chewing out the trade. But that time the place was just awful, bits of cigarette ashes and egg yolks on the table, everything dirty and depressing, and he said, “Why did you bring me here?” and he didn’t want to touch his food.

And down the street from Angelo’s, a funeral home where I’d mourned two suicides and a grisly fatal accident, Johnny Johnson and Bruno Valdez, one dead musician each in the creepy side-by-side rooms. I can’t believe I just remembered their names, those great musicians, blasted into forever by some drunk.

And a bar, the El Toro, where I once tried to order sparkling water with a bunch of my slumming artsy friends and the waitress popped her gum and spat out, “No sparkling water, honey, this is the East Side.”

So the New Yorker on the table at Young Sing was a miracle, that one ten-year-old New Yorker, something made and sent out and saved from way before my life changed, way before 9/11 changed everything, a piece of innocence, I almost wanted to say, a curiosity. I felt anchored after all. If that New Yorker was there, I knew I’ve been here before. I knew there was a dish there that I wanted, that one with those crunchy noodles I couldn’t get anywhere else in town, the dumb old town I’d lived in way longer than I ever thought I would. Maybe I was one of those ones who never got out. But, there was a New Yorker on that table, and I read it again, turning its pages sacramentally and emotionally as if it was the Gutenburg Bible.

Then I had my Cantonese-style chicken chow mein and a box of crunchy noodles, two white boxes in a brown bag, and I was back in my car. Pulling out there was always a problem for me – I was always scared of turning left, but this time, going to my new house, it made more sense to turn right – a blessing that I didn’t have to turn left out of Young Sing’s and risk losing my re-arranged and measly messed-up life.

Back in the house, I moved the easy chair around because I couldn’t yet figure out the feng shui and I didn’t have it all set up right to watch TV. I couldn’t decide yet where everything should go. I poured a glass of merlot from a half-empty bottle somebody left at the housewarming two months before. Settling down, finally, I watched “Laurel Canyon,” about a bunch of cool people who really weren’t so cool, and I ended up crying when they reconciled around the swimming pool. The part where the son grabs his mother’s toe and holds on, like a baby might, got me going, and I cried and cried.

And that’s when I opened the fortune cookie. The little white strip read, “You will be welcome at any gathering.”

God. I said it out loud. I didn’t bother to crack a smile – who cared – it would have come out like a clownish grimace and I thought, who needs fiction. And then I poured myself another glass of wine and toasted to the East Side.

Sitting there, I knew that when I called my boyfriend who was in California and didn’t have any history to speak of with the East Side, I was going to cry about it all again, and I knew what he was going to say. He would say, you feel what you feel – let it flow through you. He’s a great guy, my boyfriend, an old hippie, the best. He would say, every time you’re sad you’re letting some of it go. Don’t stop. He would tell me, that’s the classy way to handle it, to have your merlot and feel what you feel. But in the meantime I read my fortune again. I was going to be welcome at any gathering. But then I just kept crying and crying, tears dropping on the chicken chow mein and chunky noodles in white boxes on my lap, in the Laz-Y-Boy, the credits on the sad movie rolling.

Portuguese Bend, On the Pacific Coast

“drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.”
Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man”


I started feeling like a local
when I could drive Portuguese Bend
without gripping the wheel, past
signs warning “Landslides” and
“Extreme Caution" and
“Constant Movement."
Every day road crews block
the lanes, propping up and patching
where nature resolutely takes a dip,
and we locals know to slow to ten
when the sign says “Bump.” The cliffs
are steep beside this belly dancing spot.
Rocks at the bottom are black and jagged
and the plodding ocean doesn’t care.
It’s sort of thrilling, going over
the Portuguese Bend, and if
you make it you can stop
at Wayfarer’s Chapel to thank the Lord
or reflect on your survival
at the neat Narcissa Gate. But I
just like to keep on driving, over
the reassuring, risky shifting
of the earth, its constant change
a lovely stubbornness.