1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction Winter 2015 3:2

Staff Editor Kelly Grey Carlisle Managing Editors Ciara Bergin Ileana Sherry Assistant Editors Ryan Diller Dan Farris Nipuni Gomes Youssef Lemmon Samantha Mohun All staff participates in the reading and selection of work and production of the magazine. 1966 is published with the support of Trinity University, Texas and its English Department. http://new.trinity.edu Founding Editors: Mallory Conder, Paul Cuclis, Michael Garatoni, Spenser Stevens, and Matthew Stieb.

The copyrights of all texts and images contained in this magazine belong to their respective authors.

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Image credits: Above, Sarah Pickett. Cover, back cover and right, Cade Bradshaw.

Brian Michael Barbeito: “The Rested” pages 59-60.

Allison Beckley: “Crossover Trail” pages 11-12; “Sinkhole Trail” page 22.

Cade Bradshaw: pages 50, 52.

Mallory Alice Epping: “Surgery & Radiation” pages 3-4; “Hangover Please Quit” page 7; “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” pages 23-24; “Preparing For Nouveaux Chic” pages 25-26; “More To Come” 27-28; “Live Alone” page 32; “Image 2” page 34; “Pete O’Brien’s Tuckernuck Island” pages 41-42; “End Of Hummock Pond Road” page 45.

Nicole Fuentes: “Cry Boy” page 67.

Samantha Mohun: pages 53-54.

Shelby M. Rocca: “Solarization is Channel” page 10; “My Bharmacy” page 39-40; “Depth” page 66.

Bria Woods: “A Hard Look In the Mirror” pages 35-36.

Volume 3 Issue 2 Winter 2015

Dawn Newton Her Skin

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Melinda Copp Alligator Nature and Nurture

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Ben Wirth Total Recall

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Sarah Carson Aftermath 27 Adrian Koesters It Couldn’t Hurt

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Suzanne Roberts The Illuminations

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Alice Lowe Lillie’s Legacy

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Elizabeth Mosier I Have, I Fear, the Literary Temperament

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A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

Dawn Newton

Her Skin

Dots of skin speckle the waistband of her knit pants like fine grains. Beneath the cloth, on the folds of her black underwear, the speckling is patternless, yet uniform, as if someone has spilled salt that should have been dashed elsewhere.

The oncologists call it the Tarceva rash, though it looks more like acne than any eczema or pruritic disorder she has ever seen. In those first few weeks after she started the drug, she wondered if the doctors used the term “rash” because they wanted to spare the sufferers the indignity of returning to adolescence and a vocabulary that referenced pimples, pustules, and craters. But she learned over time that the rash could come differently to each Tarceva taker and in many different iterations for the same person. The dry, flaking skin. The cracks. The eruptions and cysts like acne. Red, scaly patches. And beyond the rash—darkening pigmentation and an idiosyncratic hirsutism, especially on the face.

Tarceva, which is a trade name for the drug erlotinib, is a targeted therapy that addresses cancer in individuals whose cancer has an epidermal growth factor receptor (egfr) mutation. Lung cancer often develops unchecked and unrecognized, sometimes advancing to stage iv with no external manifestation. For those who have an egfr mutation of their cancer, Tarceva keeps the cancer at bay—for days, weeks, and months. The lucky few even get years. The drug does not provide a cure or remission but an inexplicable suspension of cancer that differs for each patient, depending on how early in treatment the patient’s cancer develops resistance to the medication.

A suspension. An abeyance. She struggles with what to call the action the drug takes on her cancer. Her oncologist says the cancer is controlled, but she does not feel that she is the one who controls it.

The epidermal growth factor receptor has earned its name because it deals with the epidermis layer of skin. As a result, one of the primary side effects of the drug is the rash in its many iterations.

She learns first that Tarceva desiccates the skin. The specialty pharmacy nurses who monitor patients’ first few months on the drug counsel them to drink more water than they imagine possible and apply moisturizer at every opportunity; her pharmacy includes a bottle of lotion with the first shipment. In those first winter months, her husband rubbed it on the skin of her back each night. Various-sized containers of lotion littered the counters and tables throughout the house. Some heavily perfumed.

Sweet Pea. Peppermint. Cloying scents. A pump dispenser of Sarna, with camphor and menthol. A new kind of Aveeno, with a hint of lavender. When she forgot to moisturize her arms, fine white cracks formed across the pigment.

The welts appear suddenly, sometimes as thick lumps distorting the surface of the skin, sometimes puffy fluid-filled pouches that rest atop it. The comments on the boards refer to Grade 4 rashes and weeping sores.

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Dry skin is only one aspect of the changes. For many who take the drug, the most troubling skin problem is the continuous development of acne-like cysts on the face or trunk. She has lived with this side effect for over two years now, and she still thinks of it as a blight that has taken over her cheeks, her nose, and particularly her chin. She thinks of the biblical leprosy she read about as a child—faces

disfigured by a disease akin to rot, people marked by their deformities, stigmatized and marginalized by fear. And she thinks about meeting Lucy Grealy when they both taught at the gifted and talented writing camp. Lucy’s face had been ravaged by Ewing’s sarcoma, the reconstructive surgeries a slow process; at times there were still missing chunks of face the observer had to fill in.

Doctor Gadgeel, her oncologist, does not even hide his delight when she talks about the persistence of the rash. To him, and to so many of the oncologists, the presence of a rash signifies that the tyrosine-kinase inhibitor (tki) in Tarceva is at work, blocking or inhibiting the mutant proliferation of the protein enzyme, kinase. As long as the rash keeps blossoming, keeps rising in bumps and inflamed cysts on her chin, each papulopustular pore generating a small, fine hair, the Tarceva is accomplishing its goal. In leaving marks on her face, it is announcing success. She knows that researchers have found correlations between the existence of the rash and positive treatment outcomes, leading some oncologists to adopt a policy of “treating to rash”—maintaining the dosage of Tarceva at a high enough level to keep the rash ever-present, the cancer presumably controlled.

Patches of dark brown mottle the surface, like flecks of cinnamon shaken onto a chai latte, skating the surface and meeting the oil of the milk to join the flecks in a pooling shadow on the cream-colored foam.

The pigmentation darkens as the sun interacts with the drug and the external layers of her skin. Every few months she purchases a new, darker shade of foundation to camouflage the patches and the blemishes, but the shading on her skin is never even.

The cysts of her Tarceva rash are of the acneiform variety—the same type of cysts from acne vulgaris. When she was an adolescent, her mother taught her that vulgar meant “uncouth,” but she learned later that it actually meant “common.” Her rash is common, yet the medical websites note that those who suffer from acne vulgaris sometimes have self-esteem issues and depression as a result of their skin malformations. At first, Doctor Gadgeel prescribed the oral medication minocycline and the topical antibiotic clindamycin. She used the drugs routinely, but after a while, the minocycline seemed to affect her stomach, and she reduced her daily dosage, eventually stopping the antibiotic altogether near the end of the second year.

But she continued to experiment with topical applications. Each day she palpated her chin, navigating with her fingers what felt like a topographical map of the Rockies. She contemplated what product to put on her face. The clindamycin antibiotic gel. The hydrocortisone cream. The old adapalene gel from years ago, stuck in the back of a bathroom drawer. Neosporin. She shouldn’t be touching her face at all. In moments of stress or anxiety, her fingers creep up to her face and palpate.

Anyone who has been to a dermatologist for acne knows that you’re not supposed to touch your face.

She knows she should stop. In the car, when she drives home at night after visiting her son at college, her hand leaves the steering wheel and finds her chin in the dark.

She returns to visit the dermatologist she dispensed with when she got her original diagnosis and assumed the worst. The dermatologist who’d said “Holy fuck,” when she learned about the diagnosis and then immediately covered her mouth. She tells the dermatologist that her oncologist has given her the go-ahead to experiment with other medications. She has read an article on PubMed that talks about the use of adapalene, which she knows will be hard on her skin. The dermatologist gives her two samples to experiment with, one of them a stronger adapalene, the other a drug known as A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

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dapsone, or Aczone. When she determines, almost a month later, that the Aczone might work slightly better than the adapalene, she reads online that an oral version of the drug was originally approved for the treatment of leprosy.

As a Tarceva taker with over two years under her belt, she still has not come to terms with the welts that come and go on the visage she presents to the world each day. Yet she knows that when the rash recedes, if it recedes, the absence of blemish will be filled with portent. She finds herself in the contradictory position of wanting the rash to fade but not disappear. To abate but persist in some more contained version. A clear, unblemished face means the drug is failing.

Heavy, thick eyebrows—Brooke Shields eyebrows, they’d told her to make her feel better during puberty— travel through a cycle of inflammation, infection, shedding, and regrowth. Scabs form around short bristles of coarse, emerging brow, poking the finger she raises to touch the snips, barbed-wire sharp.

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For her back-to-school photo in Mr. Predmore’s fifth grade class, she wore a green corduroy jumper and a white print blouse with a bow at the collar. If you look closely at the photo, you can see reddish, scaly patches rising up from her neck underneath the blouse. Eczema. The rash was out of control for most of her elementary school days, erupting in patches behind her knees, on her inner arms at the elbow crook, and on her neck. When she looked at other kids, the skin at their elbows and knee junctures was clear—the bend in their limbs a joint, nothing more, not a surface of dry, fingernail-etched skin and small red sores. She always had splotchy oval patches on each arm and behind her knees, a ring encircling her neck, the borders of each patch red and irregular, signifying her allergies. With each new topical prescription she got from her pediatrician, she hoped to erase a bit of the border.

Salves, unguents, ointments, creams. Some of them thick, tar-like, and smelly. Others thin and odorless. Thirty-five years later, the location of her eczema has moved. Now her shins are covered. Her dog, Clover, licks the patch on the right one.

A forest populates the skin between her nostrils and her upper lip. For years, a slight moustache resided at the corners of her mouth, two thin copses of wispy trees, divided by a clearing, a pair of sentries. Now most of the hairs grow in thick and black. The aesthetician smoothes the green wax on the skin in sections and tugs. Cold stones dissolve the pain. Afterwards, in the car, she stares into the rear-view mirror at her face, the small area of skin above her lip smooth, hairless.

The truth is that long before she ever took a single dose of Tarceva, she had skin issues. In those elementary school days, her eczema was part of a larger constellation of problems also—chronic allergies and acute and chronic asthma. She was the only one in her school who stayed in for recess to avoid exercise and the Michigan cold. Exposure to either could immediately trigger an asthma attack.

Dusts, molds, and pollens wreaked havoc with her airways and lungs, so she stayed in and read books or waited for Mr. Grimes, the music teacher, to come and serenade her with his guitar. Yet there appeared to be no connection between the chronic and often acute asthma from her childhood and her diagnosis of lung cancer at age fifty-three.

The tiny slits in her fingers widen with the cold. Fingertip fissures. Juice from the garlic and onion creeps into the fissures, burning. She spackles them with Neosporin and wraps them in Band-Aids. Stops chopping.

It is cold on the basement floor of Sparrow Hospital where the surgeons operate. On the evening she had surgery for pericardial and pleural effusion, the condition that eventually alerted her to the advanced lung cancer in her body, everyone in the room wore a bouffant head cap like the kind she’d worn as a young girl when her mother wrapped her hair with colored rods and squeezed the Lilt permanent solution onto her scalp. They were waiting for the cardiac surgeon, Doctor Pridjian, to come into the room to mark her for the surgery. First, she had to make her own mark, and then he had to make one, on the side where the surgery was to be done.

“What surgery are we going to do on you tonight?” the nurse asked.

“Left thoracotomy and pericardial window,” she said.

“Nice. You’ve got it. Now just make a mark, anywhere on your chest, on the left side of your body.”

When Doctor Pridjian scrawled his signature under her left breast, he sighed. It was Halloween in 2012, almost midnight. He’d had an evening packed with emergency surgeries, hers one of the few he could afford to delay for a couple of hours. Later he told her husband that when he cut into her, he emptied out more bloody fluid than he’d ever seen in a chest.

But in those moments after Doctor Pridjian signed, she thought of her shock and dismay when she first saw the movie Hospital as a teenager and realized, along with everyone else watching, that the surgeons had performed a hysterectomy on the wrong woman. In the cold of Sparrow’s basement before her surgery, the staff members were doing routine checks, making sure that she was the correct patient, making sure that they were cutting into the correct side of her body. She wouldn’t learn until weeks later that the cause of her tamponade and pleural and pericardial effusion was adenocarcinoma of the left lung with metastases. On that Halloween night, as she entered the fog of

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anesthesia, she wondered how long it would take the ink marks on her skin to wash away.

She doesn’t like to tell strangers who learn about her cancer that she is a non-smoker. Dealing with strangers is always tricky, anyway. She withholds as long as she can, especially if revealing a detail to the parent of her youngest son’s new friend; she doesn’t know how prolonged the contact will be. But then sometimes the fact of the cancer comes out in a rush, at the wrong time. So much for withholding.

And the surprise people express at the severity of the diagnosis is followed by questions, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, about causes. Only medical personnel will ask outright about the smoking. Strangers will skirt the smoking issue. She wants to believe that there is one kind of lung cancer from which they all suffer, that it’s not about causes. That she doesn’t have to judge someone else’s lifestyle decision to smoke cigarettes—her dead mother smoked—just as those other people don’t need to judge her decision to gain weight to the point of obesity.

She wants to take a Silly Putty imprint of the surface of her face and arms to preserve the mottling, knowing that, unlike newspaper, her skin has no petroleum-based product to foster the transfer of images. When the hair falls out, the arms are smooth, like a swimmer’s before a meet. The non-hairy wrinkled skin on the inside of her elbows appears to be a mesh of double helixes crowded together, any pressure creating a ripple of puckers, an expanse of human crepe the texture of cancer.

But she knows she is marked by her non-smoking privilege. Her cancer has the non-smoking mutation, and the drug that controls it clearly makes its mark on her face. She rises each morning, and before she even thinks a thought, often before she even pees, she twists open the Tarceva bottle, shakes out a tablet, and fills a Dixie cup with water. She swallows the 100-milligram tablet, knowing she belongs to a privileged class of patients whose cancer has a mutation and another privileged class of cancer patients with health insurance to cover the drug that retails at $6,959 per thirty-day supply.

She tells the strangers in whom she confides eventually that she is privileged because she has never had to sit in a chair, wrapped in a blanket or quilt, sipping water and listening to music or reading a book to distract herself from the chemicals dripping into her body through a traditional chemotherapy infusion.

She does not want to obliterate the marks on her face that separate her, for now, from the others. She reaches for her face, her skin.

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Melinda Copp

Alligator

Nature a

nd Nurtu

re

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Norton was a four-foot-long alligator that lived in a pond known as L17 in the Palmetto Bluff real estate development in Bluffton, South Carolina. The day Norton gained his name, Jay Whalea, one of the natural resources managers on the property, used a rod and reel with a heavy treble hook to snag a ridge on Norton’s back. Once hooked, he reeled the alligator in like a fish and placed him into a large wooden box. Jay loaded the box into the back of a pickup truck and drove south to St. Catherine’s Island, where he and Norton caught a ferry to the Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island. Dr. Terry Norton (for whom the alligator was named) performed a short surgery, implanting a tube-shaped, pinky-finger-sized tracking device near the base of Norton’s tail. Apart from a heightened wariness of Jay Whalea, Norton’s life didn’t change much from the ordeal. Jay put him back in L17, and the transmitter under his skin probably didn’t bother him much. But he was no longer just a four-footlong alligator in a numbered pond. Norton became part of the Conservancy’s science education and community outreach program, and everyone at Palmetto Bluff started paying attention to his whereabouts.

On the morning of July Fourth, just a few months after Norton’s big trip to Jekyll Island, I met the Palmetto Bluff science and education director, Kimberly Andrews, at her office. We rode together in the Conservancy’s truck to the Inn, where any other people who’d signed up for her 9:00 a.m. alligator tracking outing were supposed to meet. The Conservancy put a few tracking outings on the community calendar every month so residents and visitors could not only see the alligator, but also get a scientist’s view of the property. We pulled into the village at morning’s peak, the sun already brightening the day. I waited for Kimberly in the truck while she walked inside to collect the tourists.

The cottage-style homes, streets lit with gas lanterns, charming wood plank buildings, and towering live oaks gave the Palmetto Bluff village a vintage southern feel. People gathered around the square in preparation for the Independence Day golf cart parade. Against the marsh-lined and natural May River backdrop, a Palmetto Bluff employee—a young man in khaki slacks and a polo shirt—bent over a sound system control panel with a set of wires in his hands. Groups of children and adults milled about the landscaped grounds. A few minutes later, Kimberly walked out the big Inn door and down the front steps with a neatly dressed woman in khaki capris and a polo shirt following half a step behind her. I moved to the back seat while Kimberly and the woman climbed into the truck. Cindy, who was visiting from North Carolina, introduced herself and said she and her husband had been to Palmetto Bluff a few times on vacation and were considering buying property there. Kimberly started up the truck and drove us over the bridge, out of the village, and toward the woods.

As we rode, I listened as Cindy asked Kimberly a few questions about her job at the Conservancy. Kimberly, a research herpetologist who was working on her Ph.D. at the time, was not the kind of person you’d typically find working for a real estate development corporation. But Palmetto Bluff was unique in that, although they were building a golf resort neighborhood on a piece of largely pristine maritime forest, they had built in the Conservancy and hired scientists and land managers like Kimberly and Jay to make the natural setting—alligators and all—part of the neighborhood’s character and draw. Kimberly’s job on these tracking outings was to instill a land ethic in property owners and potential buyers. As an ecologist studying rattlesnakes and alligators, species that most people would rather have dead than living outside their door, she wasn’t there to play the salesperson role. She chose her responses to Cindy’s questions carefully. Cindy seemed to be both interested in the natural areas and intimidated by Palmetto Bluff’s remoteness. When Cindy expressed concern about being so far from Starbucks—the closest one was over ten miles away, and the next closest one

was another fifteen—Kimberly said, “Well, the Palmetto Bluff lifestyle is not for everyone.”

When we arrived at the area of the property that would become the Barge Landing neighborhood, Kimberly pulled off the new road and parked in the grass along a thin strip of woods. As we climbed out of the truck, Kimberly strapped on a waist pack that held her radio-telemetry equipment and adjusted the baseball cap on her head. She was wearing jeans and snake boots and her long blond ponytail hung down the center of her back. We walked through the trees to the edge of Norton’s favorite pond, a little body of water known to her and the rest of the Conservancy staff as L17. The sun was shining high and bright, and the water reflected the sky and green trees like a mirror. When bulldozers dug the lagoon, the banks had been left bare, but shoulder-height pine saplings now stood amongst the grass and ruderal weeds.

Kimberly pulled the handset of her receiver out of her bag and unfolded the antenna, a metal rod on a handle with three branches along each side. When she held the antenna up and turned on the switch, a beep bounced from the little speaker. Another one followed it, and as she waved the antenna through the air in different directions, the beep increased as she moved towards Norton’s location and slowed when she turned away. The three of us turned in the direction with the more frequent beeps and looked out across the surface of the pond. About twenty yards out, the ridges of the alligator’s back and head were visible above the surface. He was floating, seemingly motionless, right where Kimberly expected to find him.

At four feet long, Norton was like an alligator teenager. He was too big to be considered a juvenile, but he wasn’t a sexually mature adult either; Kimberly called him a sub-adult. Alligators spend most of their time in the water hunting, and Norton—at four feet—would be feeding on fish, turtles, crabs, raccoons, and other small terrestrial animals that get too close to the edge. Kimberly said Norton usually stayed in this lagoon, though he had visited L18, a larger lagoon a few hundred yards away. Alligators prefer the water, but they will travel over land and marsh, if they have to, in search of a mate or territory. I later read a study conducted at the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana where researchers collected and tagged 3,601 alligators between 2000 and 2007. Of those tagged, 286 were recaptured anywhere from one month to nine years later, and the researchers measured the distance between the two capture sites to see how far the alligator had traveled. The animals moved as little as 328 yards to as far as 56 miles. The longer the span of time between captures, the greater the distance the alligator had traveled and the smaller alligators tended to travel further than the larger ones. Norton, however, because he was too young to mate, didn’t seem to have much reason to travel.

Once, Kimberly said, he went all the way to the river—quite a hike for such a small alligator—but he didn’t stay there for long and soon came back to L17.

Cindy didn’t say much about Norton. As much as I loved seeing Norton floating there in the sun, I had to admit it seemed a little strange to show off the neighborhood alligators to prospective real estate buyers. But the fact that we were there to check on Norton, not pull him from the pond and exterminate him, sent the message that the Conservancy wanted everyone to hear: life on Palmetto Bluff was about leaving space for the wild things. The alligators were, after all, here first.

14 In the 1930s, as part of the Works Progress Administration’s effort to establish fossil records of national parks, Roland T. Bird was collecting Early Cretaceous dinosaur tracks in a riverbed in Big

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Bend in Texas when he discovered some large bone fragments. The bone pieces were so large, Bird and his researchers mistook them for parts of a hip. Only after comparing the dentition of modern crocodilian bones did they realize they were looking at tooth sockets from a huge skull. By comparing the skull fragments they found in Big Bend with skulls of modern crocodilians and other prehistoric examples, Bird and a staff of researchers and assistants reconstructed a model skull using plaster, and following the complex taxonomy rules of naming species, they called the creature Phobosuchus riograndensis—it’s now known as Deinosuchus.

The first reptiles appeared on the fossil record about 320 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period, and about 70 million years later, during the Middle Triassic Period, the ancestors of both crocodilians and dinosaurs, known as the archosaurs, appeared. Many of the earliest crocodilian ancestors were small, land-based, carnivorous creatures that didn’t look much like alligators or crocodiles. Crocodilians didn’t really start to look or act like modern crocodilians until the Cretaceous, beginning about 150 million years ago, when the massive creatures like Sarcosuchus (known as Super Croc) and later the Deinosuchus ruled the swamps. These animals grew to the size of a city bus and ambushed dinosaurs that wandered down to the prehistoric shorelines to drink, much like crocodiles and alligators do to catch their prey today.

Reconstructing the skull took many years, and the finished Deinosuchus was displayed in the American Museum of Natural History’s collection. Photos taken of the monstrous skull show Roland T. Bird and Barnum Brown, both dressed in suits, measuring their magnificent reconstruction for publicity. In one picture, Erich Schlaikjer is holding the skull of another prehistoric crocodilian, Crocodylus porosus, which is dwarfed in comparison, from the museum’s collection. The Deinosuchus skull was easily as long as each man was tall, and the parted jaws, propped open with thin rods, displayed teeth thicker and longer than that of a T. rex. But these giant dinosaur-eaters weren’t the only crocodilians of the time—fossils from several other related species have been found in close proximity, suggesting the swamps of the Cretaceous were filled with crocodilians of various sizes and niches.

During the late Cretaceous, the modern alligator and crocodile subfamilies split apart. Today, the American alligator’s crocodilian ancestors are spread across the globe and include crocodiles, gharials (and the false gharial), and caimans, but the populations rarely overlap. The most common group of crocodilian is the true crocodile—subfamily Crocodylinae—including the saltwater crocodile (the largest crocodilian with maximum lengths reported at over twenty feet) in northern Australia, Indonesia, and southern Asia; the mugger crocodile in India; the Nile crocodile in Africa; the American crocodile in southern Florida; and others. The easiest way to tell a crocodile from an alligator is the head. Crocodiles have more slender snouts than their alligator cousins, and when they close their mouths, the fourth tooth on either side of the lower jaw is visible—the crocodile smile. Alligators have rounded, duck-bill shaped snouts and only the top teeth are visible when they clamp their jaws. The gharial family includes only one species: Gavialis gangeticus. These can grow to be eighteen feet long and they inhabit the fast-moving Himalayan-fed rivers of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Bhutan. Despite their size, gharials are not dangerous; these have the most slender, elongated snout of all crocodilians, which is suited for feeding exclusively on fish. The males have an odd bulb at the end of their snouts that scientists believe amplifies their mating grunts. In the Tomistominae subfamily, the false gharial, Tomistoma schlegelii, grows about twelve feet long and differs slightly from the gharial in head shape and bone structure. They inhabit the freshwater rivers, swamps, and lakes of the Malay Peninsula. Caimans belong to the same family as alligators—Aliga-

toridae—and include eight species and subspecies that live in the Amazon Basin of South America and as far north as southern Mexico. Speckled caimans are popular exotic pets in America, and supposedly a colony of escapees lives near Homestead, Florida. Caimans look like alligators, but their snouts, while more rounded than a crocodile’s, are not quite as round and blunt as the alligator’s. The caimans’ most distinct feature is armored belly scales—other crocodilians only wear armor on their backsides. Of all the crocodilians, alligators are the hardiest and range the farthest north. The Chinese alligator (Alligator sinesis) is the American alligator’s closest cousin and the only other member of the genus Alligator. The Chinese alligator is smaller and stockier than its American cousin—from four to six feet long—and feeds on fish and amphibians. They inhabit only a small region of the lower Yangtze River delta on the eastern edge of China. After all these millions of years of evolution and specialization, the crocodiles, gharials, caimans, and alligators we see today share more than ancestry.

All crocodilians, like every other wild thing on the earth, are faced with the next great feat of survival: adapting to life in a human world. And none of them are doing particularly well. Because of hunting and habitat loss, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (iucn)/World Conservation Union categorizes all species of crocodile “endangered” or “vulnerable,” though the African Slender-Snouted Crocodile and the African Dwarf Crocodile are considered “indeterminate” because not enough is known about these animals to properly categorize them as “endangered,” “vulnerable,” or “rare.” Gharials and false gharials are both endangered. Most caiman species are endangered. And habitat destruction has left only a few hundred Chinese alligators living in the wild. Although once endangered by overhunting, American alligator population numbers are up, and they’re hailed as an ecological success story. Compared with other crocodilian species, Norton and his fellow alligators were thriving. The alligator’s narrative is about returning from the brink. They adapted and evolved over the millenia, out-surviving other evolutionary threads. And even though humans nearly killed them all, they rebounded as if the whole thing never happened.

That something so persistent could be wiped from earth seems preposterous. But after seeing Norton floating in his lagoon, surrounded by newly paved roads with storm drains, sidewalks, and little orange flags marking property lines, I felt a little worried for him.

Alligators need space. They are territorial and prefer to find their own little section of a pond or river to call home. This home could be any fresh water body with a food supply and space for building a den—most ponds and rivers and marshes in the South meet these needs. The trick is finding a home that’s safe. Small alligators have to watch out for bigger alligators. Males kill smaller alligators to protect their own territory or take over territory; females kill to protect their nests. And they have to watch out for people, who run them over as they cross roads and in general don’t like having alligators around. Wildlife management officials get phone calls every summer about alligators in swimming pools and garden fish ponds, probably because the animals wandered in search of territory and mistook the man-made water fixtures for potential habitat. Once an alligator finds a home that’s free of bigger gators and people problems, they can make themselves comfortable, and they do.

Wetland ecosystems rely on the alligator as much as the alligator relies on the wetland, in part because of the alligator’s propensity for digging and altering its surroundings. Alligators build dens by digging into the bank, using their feet to push the mud out. Alligators dig the entrance tunnel starting under the waterline, so they often can’t be seen from dry land and will make the den at least large enough to fit their whole body inside. An alligator will work for hours to create its hideaway, and after building this home, they might stay there for years, digging it larger as they grow. Then A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

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when summer turns to fall and air temperatures drop, the alligator can keep a little warmer underground. Alligators don’t hibernate—hibernation is a mammals-only way of surviving winter. But as ectotherms—animals with a body temperature more or less regulated by the environment they’re in—alligators’ body temperature drops and slows the animal to a state of inactivity. At the onset of this dormant time, alligators retire to their subterranean dens. They’re also safer under there—an alligator that can’t move because it’s so cold can’t protect itself either. When the alligator emerges in the spring, it is often covered in mud—the red clay mud of the deep South. They also use the dens when it gets too hot, which it tends to do; come August, no one wants to be outside. And this alligator den-digging helps break up and aerate the wetland soil. Another way alligators alter their environment to suit themselves is by digging gator holes. During periods of drought, they often dig holes to collect water so they can dip in and keep cool. These holes create havens for fish, turtles, birds, and other animals that benefit from the alligator’s industriousness.

Alligators grow an average of a foot per year during the first five years of life, and then the growth rate slows as they approach adulthood, particularly in females because they’re most likely putting that growth energy toward preparing for reproduction. Both males and females reach sexual maturity at about seven feet long. So Norton, at four feet, had a few years before he would feel the urge to find a mate. Availability of food also affects how much and how fast an alligator grows, so two alligators of the same age may be different sizes depending on how much they eat. And their eating makes them an essential part of wetland ecosystems today and into the future.

The natural world is a system of checks and balances. One creature eats another, which eats another, which eats still another, on down the chain. This system prevents any one species from eating more than their fair share of anything else. As soon as alligators hatch, they feed themselves, and the little hunters catch and kill dragonflies, minnows, and other small prey the same way mom snaps up raccoons and turtles. As they grow, alligators eat larger fish and birds. Adult alligators are top predators of the marshes they inhabit; they are the keystone in their ecosystem’s pyramid of life, opportunistically eating any aquatic and terrestrial animals they can catch, including gar and bowfin, turtles, snakes, birds, raccoons, nutria (in Louisiana), feral hogs, and even white-tailed deer. From June of 1986 to May of 1989, researchers on Cumberland Island, Georgia, searched alligator basking sites, holes, and dens for alligator feces and carcasses of terrestrial mammals. During that time they collected thirty-three samples, twenty-eight of which contained hair from mammals, including river otters, raccoons, rice rats, white-tailed deer, feral swine, and armadillo. Studies have calculated that alligator feces contains 1 percent of mammal hair that the alligator consumes, and so this confirmed for the researchers that mammals make up a large part of the adult alligator’s diet. They also found several deer carcasses stashed in alligator holes in remote locations where death by anything but alligator was unlikely. A large alligator, even though primarily an aquatic animal, prevents terrestrial animal populations from expanding beyond what the habitat can support, which is of utmost importance in a world where natural resources are disappearing so quickly. Human activities have reduced most top predator populations to paltry numbers, allowing species like white-tailed deer and feral hogs to breed and flourish at the expense of forests and birds and human gardens across the southeast. A large alligator capable of eating white-tailed deer and wild hogs might not be so bad to have around—if only it weren’t a large alligator.

The business of being the big gator in the swamp is not pleasant, which makes their importance easy to overlook. Just getting a meal means thrashing violently and ripping flesh. Smaller prey

like turtles and snakes can be swallowed in a few chops, but if an alligator gets a hold on something too big to eat in one mouthful, like a white-tailed deer or a feral hog, he will drown it and use his death roll maneuver to rip the carcass apart in chunks and limbs. When he gets his fill, he will drag the leftovers to his den or ashore and stash them somewhere safe until he gets hungry later. The flesh may rot for days before the alligator eats it all, and he will do so without turning up his nose at the stench.

Their eating habits are gruesome. Alligators can also be quite boorish—alligator-ish?—in their peer interactions. I’ve seen alligators missing legs, tails, and chunks of their jaws because of fights with other alligators. And I’ve seen them killed and eaten for swimming around the wrong pond, or getting too close to someone’s nest. Everything about the alligator’s existence is so gruesome and repulsive it seems to go against humanity itself.

But everything exists because it holds something else up. Each thread in the web of life connects to other threads—you can’t pluck one without shifting others and the whole thing. Norton’s life was part of something even bigger than Palmetto Bluff. Alligators are a valuable part of the world and the ecosystem. But when you’re dealing with an apex predator in a human setting, is that still enough?

Alligators will continue to be alligators, but people will always want to be close to a Starbucks—and the planet will always be the same size. So why bother saving a place for alligators at all?

Not long after I went tracking with Kimberly for the first time, Norton gained a female counterpart research subject named Marge, after a Palmetto Bluff resident. Marge was the second alligator of what Kimberly hoped would become five study animals. Jay caught this one too, and after a boat ride to Jekyll, Dr. Norton implanted her with the transmitter. When she was re-released in her lagoon, not far from Norton’s, some joked that Norton now had a girlfriend. Though in reality, Marge, at seven feet long, was probably a little too much woman for Norton, who may not be large enough to mate for a few years.

Embedded within that muscled and armored body, alligators have a walnut-sized brain that’s more complex than other reptiles’. When compared to the human experience, all animals operate on a completely unfamiliar plane of sensory existence. Alligators rely heavily on sight, but also sense vibrations in the water through pits that line their jaws. They, I’m told, are capable of learning commands similar to a dog. Alligators live in complex social structures where the biggest gators demand, and get, the most respect through body language and making noise. Kent Vliet, a biologist from the University of Florida, studied alligator-to-alligator communication on the St. Augustine Alligator Farm’s captive alligator in the 1980s, and his research was documented in a National Geographic movie about alligators and the Okefenokee Swamp that came out in 1986. The film shows Vliet, a stalky young researcher with thinning hair and seemingly unshakable nerves wading out into the park lagoon where ninety-one adult alligators were kept. He was wearing nothing more than swimming trunks and a t-shirt. In the movie, the gators, some at least twelve feet long, were shown bumping into each other, growling, and charging from banks, though never directly at Vliet, who was lying stomach down in the dark shallow water, observing at eye-level the body language, vocalizations, and subtle nudges that made this community. Vliet learned from watching alligators that when a large bull alligator wants to make his presence known, he says “here I am” by finding a conspicuous spot along the shore, raising up on all four legs, and slapping his jaws with a clap on the water. This inspires other alligators, both male and female, to respond with their own headslaps. The response may not be immediate however, with perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes lapsing before others in the pond headslap because each alligator must find a suitable spot from which to announce his location A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

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and status. Sub-adult alligators like Norton even join in the headslapping, but more so for practice than advertisement.

The communication method often associated with alligator mating is the bellow. On the evenings and early mornings in spring, when the temperature has risen to a comfortable level and the urge to breed takes hold, alligator communities commence what can only be described as a chorus.

Vliet observed that females often start the song, but the males quickly join and within seconds often all the gators have chimed in. The males’ bellowing is more dramatic than the females’ and includes a water show. They begin by raising their head up out of the water and contracting the larynx in a gulp to inhale deep. Then the alligator lowers his body back into the water, arches his tail, pulls his head back, and emits sub-audible vibrations, causing the water to rise and fall like a fountain of raindrops off his ridged back. And finally the low, guttural, roar carries through the swamp. They may do this over and over again for hours at the peak of mating season, emitting musk as they sing, and hopefully with the combination of the sub-audible vibrations and the bellow vocalization, some female answers the call. If Marge did breed on Palmetto Bluff while the Conservancy was tracking her, she would likely be swept away by her chosen male based on his size and bellowing abilities.

The actual act of mating begins when one alligator approaches another. Although this may elicit a fight at other times of year, the animals, through body language, communicate different intentions and gently nudge each other on the head and neck. If this goes well, the alligators swim close together in an aquatic dance that involves blowing bubbles, pushing onto each other’s backs, and submerging each other under the water. The courting and getting to know each other can last for hours, and it doesn’t always lead to mating. When it does, intercourse lasts for about fifteen minutes, and the alligators often repeat the act several times over the course of a few days. Then the short union is over; the male heads off, often to find another mate, and the female, left with her burden, finds a place to build her nest.

Mother alligator spends hours constructing the nest of mud and grass and sticks. She then guards the nest for the sixty-five day incubation period so carefully that turtles have been known to sneak in and lay their eggs within the alligator nest, thereby affording their young protection they themselves are not capable of providing. E.A. McIlhenny, whose family owned the Tabasco hot sauce company in Louisiana, was an avid alligator enthusiast who kept many alligators in pens and also kept a close watch over the thousands of animals that lived on his family’s six-thousand-acre property. McIlhenny has long held the title for catching and killing the largest alligator on record, which was nineteen feet and two inches long, on January 2, 1890, a time when he was a young man and large alligators weren’t such a rarity. But no one knew much about alligators at the time; and much of what we claimed to know about them was false. In his book, The Alligator’s Life History, McIlhenny described what he knew about alligators, having coexisted so closely with a healthy population of them.

The book focuses on dispelling the alligator myths of the day, perpetuated by imaginative travelers and mistaken scientists, but it’s also regarded as one of the most important books written about alligator natural history. In one part, he wrote about a time when two alligators he kept in adjacent pens mated. He released the female so she could build her nest and lay her eggs, and then he followed her, built a cover to hide behind, and watched her work for hours at a time, digging and placing mouthfulls of mud and grass. While McIlhenny watched the nest, the alligator mother charged him with several warning attacks, and he wrote that she had to be subdued after the babies hatched so he could dig them out and measure them. Seeing the alligator as an overprotective parent certainly lends them

some charisma. But the protective nature of the crocodilian mother is an important survival strategy that helps increase her offspring’s odds. A third of all alligator nests are destroyed by predators or flooding, and of the forty or so eggs she lays, only five of those reach adulthood.

Norton the alligator, long before being named such, would have been laid and guarded by his mother in a nest somewhere on or near Palmetto Bluff. After developing inside his protective enclosure, something compelled him—lack of space, perhaps, instinct for sure, and maybe even curiosity—to use the special tooth he’d developed on the tip of his snout just for this purpose and cut a slit in the egg shell. His siblings, of which there would have been anywhere from thirty to sixty, did so around the same time as well. Those eggs that developed in the warmest parts of the nest, 34 degrees Celsius and above, were males like Norton. Anyone located in an area 30 degrees or below was female. The glossy eggs—similar in size and shape to that of a chicken, though much thicker—were made of fibrous material reinforced with calcium and quite strong. It can take the baby alligator, which is usually about nine inches long and a perfect miniature of his parents, several hours to fully break the shell and wriggle free. As much work as this first feat of life required, breaking through their shells was easy for the little alligators compared to the heavy mound of grass and mud Norton and his siblings emerged to find themselves buried under.

Even with so many little bodies trying to escape from inside the fortified mound, the nest material the alligator mother collected from her swampy environs and so carefully smoothed would be too heavy for the hatchlings to move, and so, overwhelmed, baby alligators do the only thing they know how. They cry for help, a characteristic umph that penetrates the mound and brings their mother running. With a tenderness not often associated with predatory reptiles like crocodilians, the female alligator removes mouthfuls of nest until the tiny new alligators are free. If she didn’t come, the hatchlings would remain buried. After digging the hatchlings out of the nest, the mother carries them in jaws capable of crushing a cow femur in one snap and delivers them to the water, where they swim readily and stay close to mom until they are a year or two old.

Alligators enter the world on the bottom of the food chain—wading birds, raccoons, other alligators, and just about anything else predatory will eat an alligator hatchling. So the alligator mother whose offspring are to survive these vulnerable days will guard them, answer their beck and umph calls, and chase away anything that seems threatening to her brood. I once saw an alligator control agent pull a mother alligator from a lagoon because she’d so aggressively guarded her babies that she’d become a dangerous menace to her human neighbors. Her pond was situated in a back corner of a middle-class planned urban development, near a forest, but also near houses, a road, and a sidewalk that wound around her turf. The houses were small and packed tightly together along the streets. On the day of her removal, a weekend afternoon, people were mowing their lawns and kids were playing in front yards. The human activity undoubtedly put the alligator on edge, and some of the residents I spoke to said people had been feeding her and harassing her for months. When I looked out over the pond, I saw two sizes of babies. No wonder she’d grown so agitated—she had two years worth of baby alligators to look after in that pond. No one could so much as ride a bicycle past the pond without being pursued. That’s when the Department of Natural Resources came to take her away. While she was snared and pulled ashore, fighting and rolling, her little ones watched from the pond. She was killed later that day because she was so aggressive toward people, and without her, the babies didn’t have much chance. Norton’s early days would have been spent under mom’s close watch, and she must have been vigilant—his presence as a sub-adult was a testament to that.

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Around the same time Kent Vliet appeared swimming with the alligators in the National Geographic documentary, he was also written up in The New Yorker by Diane Ackerman. She visited him in St. Augustine, and her article was one of humanity’s deepest plunges into the alligator realm.

At one point she asked Vliet what he thought was going on in the alligator’s brain. A dial tone, Vliet said, in a way that was written as off-the-cuff, and the article explained that the alligator’s existence was one of pure instinct. I’m not one to question the experts, which Vliet assuredly was and is, but for me his dial-tone description told more about how far human understanding of animal intelligence has advanced in the past thirty years than it did about what the alligator might be thinking. Until recently, a dial tone is how many people described activity in many animals’ brains. And compared to the human brain, animal thoughts may look basic and flat in comparison. But a dial tone is too simple an explanation, especially when considering an animal’s place in the modern human world.

Norton, floating in his pond on that sunny July morning, was the product of adaptations and survival strategies that evolved over millenia. Basic instincts to hunt and mate may control his actions, but underlying every instinct is survival. In all the knowledge we’ve gathered about life on earth, we’ve only begun to appreciate the idea that intelligence can be something different from human intelligence. Isn’t it possible that the alligator—and probably every other creature—knows something we don’t? It could be, for example, a sense. When the tsunami hit Thailand in 2005, many reported seeing animals, long before the humans had any idea what was about to happen, heading for high ground. They knew something we didn’t. I read an article that suggested the animals could hear the earth rumbling—and perhaps not that they heard it with their ears and had a corresponding thought in their brain about a tsunami and moving to higher ground, but that something deep within them, some knowledge held intact by evolution, just knew what to do. An alligator—every species—has accumulated genetic knowledge over unfathomable amounts of time, and the question of whether or not we should save space for them as we make the world human seems selfish and small-minded. If Norton could hear the earth rumbling—or whatever he could hear—then I was dying to know.

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Total Recall Ben Wirth

We try again. I flip the page to a group of drawings of household tools—a wrench, a hammer, that kind of thing. The drawings are in their simplest possible form, like the first page of directions. Our goal is to work through each, identifying the object in the drawing.

Back when we lived together, I felt like the understudy. I was the worse writer, the worse academic, the worse poker player—always trying to glean as much as I could from his casual genius. “Let’s try the first one,” I say, pointing to the wrench.

Addison’s Disease, when undiagnosed, can lead to an Addisonian Crisis, which can cause seizures from low sodium levels in the blood (hyponatremia). The symptoms of the disease can exist long before its diagnosis.

The hard part, he tells me, is knowing the difference between what information has been lost and what was never there. Am I just stupid and don’t know what a kiwi looks like? he asks me, looking for an answer. It’s a tough one, I admit.

His doctor told him to think of it like a hard drive crashing on a computer. All the data is still there, it just takes work to recover it. Trauma heals like a lie, bending its way into a new truth. When I hear him speak for the first time, a strained slur out of the side of his mouth, I’m unconvinced.

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Associative agnosia, caused by trauma to the occipito-temporal cortex, means he can tell me what a wrench is, what a wrench does; he can even draw a wrench for me, but can’t find it on the page we look over. When the workbook asks us to list vegetables, all that comes up are carrots, every time.

In times like these, we tend to think of ourselves—

how stable is the self I consider myself to be, a ghost encoded somewhere in our own unstable, wrinkled, and leathery gray matter—me me me.

Here, the answers are simple. A ball-peen hammer is a ball-peen hammer; a saw is always a saw. I’m working him at a blistering pace, paging through each group of images and exhausting the still-healing brain, on the lookout for recalls.

“Which is the saw?” I ask. When he starts to nod and convince himself of his answer, I can tell that he has given up. He points at the hammer, and I shake my head. I point out the saw, and he focuses on its shape, abstruse and threatening, and he nods as if it were obvious.

I look for gestures, phrases—whatever snaps us back to roommates. I think of the broken hard drive, its garbled data we sort through for patterns.

When I asked a deaf friend how people couldn’t tell he was deaf at first, he told me—you just fake it.

“Can we do another one?” he asks.

Yes, yes, yes.

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A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

Aftermath Sarah Carson

i.

The night the police taped bedsheets over my neighbor’s back bedroom window, I was running late for dinner.

My friends’ local IPAs were already wetting rings through their napkins at a restaurant across town when I pulled into the alley behind my building, where a police SUV was parked across four spots in an attempt to keep everyone at home.

“What’s going on?” I asked a younger officer, his bicycle propped up against our open back gate, but I hadn’t cared about the answer.

“Mmmm…” he started.

“Just some drama?” I asked.

“It’s over now,” he said.

I had somewhere to be. And in our neighborhood these things usually work themselves out. ii.

It wasn’t until the next morning that anyone realized the dog was missing.

“Sonia,” I emailed. “What did they do with Mike’s dog?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied. “But I can ask the management company during the conference call later today.”

I phoned the police.

“I live on Chase Avenue where they found the dead body yesterday. Do you know where they took the dog?”

The desk officer put the phone down on the counter and began speaking to someone beyond the receiver’s earshot.

“Is that confirmed?” I heard him say. “It’s not confirmed?”

“We don’t know what happened to the dog,” he told me finally.

“Hypothetically, where would they take a dog in a case like this?” I asked.

“To South Side Animal Control,” he replied. iii.

That first night my own dog had reveled in the commotion.

Out on the street, where all the neighbors had gathered to spread misinformation, where I was by that time running a full hour late for dinner, a police sergeant crouched to let my dog sniff his moustache, massaged my dog’s soft, floppy ears.

“What happened?” I asked the downstairs couch surfers who had congregated at the side entrance.

“The renters found Mike on the floor,” the one with the shoulder-length Jesus hair and goatee said. “His head was bleeding. No one’s sure from what.”

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iv.

At work on the second day, I refreshed the Animal Control website so many times my boss came to talk to me about it.

“Do you need to go home?” she asked.

“No, I need to go to Animal Control,” I said.

“Sonia, is this Mike’s dog?” I wrote, attaching a picture from the website.

“That’s not her. I’ll email you when I talk to the management company,” Sonia said.

“Go to Animal Control and come back,” my boss said.

“What about this one?” I emailed Sonia again.

“I said I’d email you,” she replied.

I got in the car and drove north instead of south. I set my alarm clock for two hours, climbed into bed and held my own dog against me.

“Did you find her?” my boss asked later.

“I didn’t find her,” I replied. v.

At the restaurant that first day, my friends were deep in conversation at the bar when I eventually showed up.

“Something terrible has happened at my house,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” someone replied.

“We were just talking about Friday night,” someone else said.

“Oh,” I said and didn’t bring it up again. vi.

On the morning of the third day, all the blinds in Mike’s apartment were closed, but the back bedroom window was open.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” I texted a friend, the one from dinner, the one with the wet napkin ring, the one who got so drunk that night she ordered chicken wings for the first time in several vegetarian years.

“I need someone to go to Animal Control with me,” I said.

“I can’t go to Animal Control, but you can come here after,” she wrote back.

I walked to my car balancing a bagel on a plate and a cup of coffee in my arms. I sat in my driver’s seat and watched a breeze suck the bedsheet in and out of the open frame. vii.

That night a news blog ran just three sentences.

There were two men found in the apartment.

One of them had a gun. viii.

On the fourth day, I refreshed the website again, but there was no dog.

I dressed for a long drive and rows of dog cages and barking and all the other animals I couldn’t save. The phone began to ring.

“Turn on the news,” Brother Tim said.

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“Just tell me,” I said. “I don’t want to see.”

“I know that she’s famous now and the whole world wants to meet her,” I wrote to the veterinarian, “But it would mean a lot for me to see her. This whole ordeal has been so unbelievable. I’ve been looking for her all week, and the police wouldn’t tell me anything. I hope you’ll understand.”

I took my own dog outside, and I didn’t make him wear a leash because dogs were meant for coming back on their own.

Sonia was standing with her own dog by the billowing sheet in Mike’s back window.

“The association is going to send flowers,” she told me.

“I’m taking my dog to the beach,” I said. “I can’t do this right now. I can’t do this ever again.” x.

On the fifth day, I asked my pastor to pray.

Brother Tim preached a beautiful sermon about learning to love.

Sister Connie raised her hands above the wine and said, “We pray for Mike, and we pray for Steven. We pray for the dog, who you may have seen on the news this week, who miraculously survived a gunshot wound to her skull.”

I bowed my head and cried into my hands. xi.

On day six, I went to work and wrote reports and replied to emails and talked to people on the phone.

None of them asked about Mike.

None of them asked about the dog. xii.

“My neighbor shot his friend and then shot his dog in the head and then shot himself and no one cares,” I wrote to my friend, the one from dinner, the one who couldn’t come to Animal Control.

“I feel so alone,” I told her.

“I’m surprised you’re so affected by this,” she wrote back.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean, I thought.

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xiii.

On day eight, I left my camera charger at home on the kitchen counter and went back to get it on my lunch break.

The bedsheet had been removed from Mike’s window and white paper had been taped up in its place.

Out on the street a van marked Aftermath Cleaners was parked at the hydrant.

I went upstairs and threw up in the sink. I texted my friend and said, “The name of the cleaning company is Aftermath Cleaners.”

“That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“It’s the fourth most terrible thing that’s happened this week.”

xiv.

On day ten, the public relations lady from the veterinarian said I could come see the dog.

“I’m sure it’d mean a lot to her to see a friendly face,” she emailed.

On day eleven she apologized.

“I thought I could make it happen,” she said. “But everyone wants to see her. They’re not going to let you in.” xv.

“I can’t stand this fucking window anymore,” I told my mom as I parked my car after work on day sixteen.

The window was closed. The paper was gone. The sheet was taped back up in its place. All the blinds had been shut for days.

“Do something to make it beautiful,” mom said. “Leave flowers. Draw a picture.”

“Dear Mike,” I wrote. “I’m sorry I never thought to tell you that everything gets better if you give it enough time.” xvi.

On day 19, an antique dealer came and removed several things from Mike’s apartment. I watched him do it, but none of what he took looked like an antique to me.

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xvii.

On day twenty-one, someone parked a dumpster in front of the building, and two movers in denim jumpsuits spent all day tossing mattresses and books and dishware and baseball caps over its open roof.

When I returned from work, their truck was blocking half of my parking spot.

One of them insisted I could still fit, and when I couldn’t manage it, he hopped behind the wheel and parked it for me.

The sweat from his back soaked through to my seat. xviii.

When the movers were gone, a man hoisted his teenage daughter over the edge of the dumpster to retrieve several bags of dog food and a plastic bin to carry them.

I watched from my window, my own dog sleeping soundly on the couch.

xix.

At two thirty in the morning of day two, after drinks, after dinner, after drinks again, after the chicken wings, after my friend’s friend asked if she could use my bathroom, after we went inside and peed and came back and stood in the alley outside Mike’s window – forgetting for a while that it was Mike’s window – after we all argued about the quickest way back to the train station, one of us yelled at another about forgetting something. She looked like she might cry but didn’t. I wanted to say something to her, but I couldn’t.

I haven’t seen her since.

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It Couldn’t Hurt Adrian Koesters

For Jay, and for Bolfa Gorski and Harry Leggs

37

All the lights in the coffee shop are on; it’s getting dark at last here in Tacoma in early August, 2008. The misshapen furniture is exactly like the hippy places we used to go to in Bellingham, in high school. There’s a scent of uncleanness that’s statutory in places like this, but this isn’t a hippy crowd, or at least it isn’t anymore.

By now I’m not really choosing, just reacting, and all the while inside thinking, Shut up, shut up, shut up, trying to will the audience into silence. It’s been about twenty minutes under the lights, up at the mic at a live show of “A River and Sound Review;” the crowd is chuckling, my friend’s Texas accent bellows in my ear. My other friend spots me a line in her Romanian accent, more laughter. For now, my voice flattens from the nasal cavities of who I am supposed to be, a former member of the kgb who participates in an American women’s book club. It’s a riot.

“Pliiz,” I say, coins rolling from my mouth, the laughter slapping us, I feel it, in the face.

The room is filled with people who love me, or, if they don’t love me, wish me well. We all wish each other well. I’ve been looking forward to our part of the show, but I’m nervous. There are a few classically-trained people in the audience who might be more on the competitive side—some will be the first, some the last to admit it—and one of them later will tell me my stand-up performance was very amusing although my Russian accent wasn’t quite accurate. I want to tell her that no one does accents better than I do but that half my tongue and jaw have been numb for twenty years after a botched molar extraction, but then I catch myself, remembering this is the kind of garbage I’m trying not to say, that I’ve been advised not to bring up in conversation anymore. I try to remember I’m avoiding bodily materialism, the collecting of tics, pains, and obscure illnesses as means of self-disclosure, though, really, in the Pacific Northwest, if you can’t talk about your health issues, it’s a bit like not wanting to talk about the weather in Nebraska, where I live. You run out of conversation a lot faster. Still, I want to tell her about my numb jaw, because I have been classically trained and I’m a touch competitive.

I’m also in a lot of pain, but this does not have anything to do with my lame tongue, though my mouth tastes like quarters, and that’s a bad sign. My health issue, which I truly have been advised not to talk about, is fibromyalgia. It’s not a disease but a disorder or syndrome, and a relatively common one, although I only know one other person who has it. I was once told that with about five million sufferers, it’s considered one of the most common of rare disorders, wherein the brain doesn’t decipher normal signals of sensation, rather interpreting them as pain, sometimes mild, sometimes large. Right now, I’m fighting the large signals—coins for noise in my mouth, lights blaring in my ears—the worst signs, the ones that mean Get out of here, now. Unless you’re very different from most people who have fibromyalgia, this is the kind of signal you learn to recognize immediately and most of the time that you tend to ignore.

You are usually not terribly smart to do so, but still, I know what’s happening won’t kill me—I know it isn’t killing me, I should say. Fibromyalgia has only recently—within the past ten or fifteen years, which in the medical world is fairly recent—been understood as an ailment of physical origin with measurable physical responses. Although it can be “co-morbid” (this is one of my favorite phrases on earth—as if you have a sibling and one of you is eventually going to kill the other and you are both perfectly agreeable about whomever of the two of you it turns out to be) with diseases

like ms and lupus, fibro itself is not degenerative. Still, though it is now possible to observe what goes wrong in the brain and the spinal column in persons who have it, fibromyalgia remains “eu,” “etiology unknown.” And, because there is no known cause—no one cause, likely—there’s no real cure for it, though there are more treatments that help to manage the pain, fatigue, and foggy brain that are typical of full-blown fibro than when I was first diagnosed in 2002. I was lucky: a few years earlier fibro was still thought to be entirely psychosomatic, a side-effect of depression or having overloaded on estrogen, a literally hysterical complaint. Most fibro patients are women, though doctors are diagnosing men more often and there is a recognized diagnosis of juvenile fibromyalgia as well. Today, as with many diseases and disorders, a genetic vulnerability is seen with the condition, its onset likely due to traumatic experience in the form of injury, accident, or abuse. My body could have opened up to fibromyalgia from any of those, or from the three hours I spent in my early twenties in that dentist’s chair getting my perfect ability to perform accents ruined, or from an early surgery. It really doesn’t matter; it really can’t be known, and knowing makes no difference. As with much chronic illness, the only “outcome” is ad terminus.

Some physicians still believe that while the condition is not hysterical in the clinical sense (assuming there is something called “hysteria” in the clinical sense), fibromyalgia, they say, is nevertheless an “invisible disability” that can show up in the classically-trained perfectionist, especially if she is a woman. This really is what they say, as if there is something about women being perfectionists that is different from other people’s perfectionism (“You mean, unlike yourself, Doc?”). It’s not surprising, given this strong body-mind perception of connection, that the usual slew of remedies including meditation, yoga, and acupuncture are recommended as ancillary treatments, but let’s face it, none of them hurt, and most of them likely help whatever else is going on in your life. In about half an hour I’m going to be wishing I’d done at least one of them, if not all three.

Shut up, shut up, shut up. I am remembering as I stand under these lights how a physical therapist who evaluated me for aquatic therapy shuddered when I told her what I had.

“Well, it’s not as bad as, like, ra, is it?” I asked her. I thought rheumatoid arthritis was the worst thing you could get.

“Well, it’s kind of worse,” she said. “ra you can take something for.” And what she meant was, ra you can take something for that will help.

Later I learned that for many patients, fibro can cycle on and off for a while, or can go into remission completely, but more commonly tends to set up camp for good and after that it’s what you live with. Pain meds don’t really take the pain away, but the temporary relief from caring about the pain becomes quite important, some days vital. Still, you (and by “you” of course I mean “I”) feel like a junkie when you ask for narcotics, because you get treated like a junkie when you ask for them.

Currently, for example, I have to sign a pain contract promising that I’ll inform my doctor if I begin to abuse my medicines, or if I use them other than prescribed, or even if I feel myself getting overly fond of them, in a day-dreaming or romantic sort of way, I suppose.

The hardest thing to explain about fibromyalgia is also the thing that makes it hardest to live with. They call it pain for a reason, but with pain comes a decreased ability to recover, both from pain and from fatigue, and it’s nearly impossible to predict what circumstances will affect you to what degree on any given occasion, or how long you’ll be out of commission following a “flare.” Sometimes this can be a matter of hours, but I can still feel sick three days after having over-done it. So, for example, if we were doing this show two hours earlier that night, I might have been fine by the end of A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

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the night. Two hours later I might be dead, or wishing myself dead.

And often, the solution to this unpredictability is isolation—you leave early if you go out, you stay home in the first place instead of going out, you don’t return invitations, you cancel one invitation after another, people stop inviting you, asking you, talking to you. Please don’t misunderstand—I know full well how much of a pain in the ass it is to have a friend with a chronic illness. Just like the person with the illness, you never know what’s going to hurt them or how badly it will, and after a while you don’t want to intrude, or get stood up again, or get lashed out at if things are really bad, and I’ve done all those things, and I’ll do the last one the night of this performance.

And, of course, there is a part of me that wishes people gave more of a damn, or asked how I’m doing a little more often, or didn’t get upset when I cancel plans at the last minute. But these are all very much wishful thinking, as they should be. If nothing else, even when it doesn’t, what fibromyalgia ought to teach you is to be a bit more patient with yourself and others, a little more open, a little less self-protective and less self-judging. These seem like painful things, but compared to actual pain, they are not.

But they are shameful, and as it turns out, it’s the shame that really hurts. I might say that by now, in 2015, I’ve learned some of those lessons somewhat better and I’m a little less ashamed of myself when I don’t live up to expectations, mine or others’. I wish I could give you an “Aha there!” revelation about the whole thing, but the truth is, I’m still very much ashamed to have a chronic illness, especially an invisible one. That feeling above all makes the management of the disorder the hardest to deal with. Some days I do well, others I’m angry and resentful and just want to be left alone or just want someone to miraculously understand exactly what I want without my having to tell them one more time. This, of course, is an impossibility. Who could ever know that what I really want today is a phone call or an email, even though last night what I really wanted was a pain pill and to be left the hell alone? I have a friend who blogged about how people with “invisible disabilities” should get over

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themselves, and I even felt ashamed about that! And, speaking of lessons, I realize now, in 2015, that a good bit of what makes me feel ashamed is needing anything, and it is this most common feeling among women that perhaps means that the doctors are not as uninformed as I would like to believe.

Later on the night of this performance, I will take something that won’t lighten the pain but will make me high enough not to care, but before the evening is over, I will still fight my head again and again: It hurts, it hurts, I will still want to jump up and scream at everyone, Shut up, for Christ’s sake, shut up! I do have it enough together to remember screaming is rarely a good idea, but I will not have it together enough to realize that nobody in that room has the remotest idea of what I am feeling, and in another hour, I will lash out at another friend who is merely being very kind in a loud voice—or maybe it isn’t loud at all, maybe I just taste it that way. Thank God it’s over and I can go home I think as she walks me out, but she’s still talking until, “Please, can you just stop?” I say. I can’t believe I’ve said it out loud, and she reacts as if I’ve hit her, which I may just as well have done. I try to make a recovery, tell her why I said it, that it’s the pain, but I’m ashamed, and I can’t, and it hurts.

I think eventually I make some kind of repair, but things are never quite the same between us, and that’s how that is.

But just before this, we’re not quite ready to go, we do get down from the mic at last, lots of laughter following us to our seats, lots of smiles on sounds wave our way, lots of love blending in with the aromas of the evening. Someone’s laughing, someone’s spilling a beer across the table, the hilarity and racketing go on for the rest of the break, and there’s a place under the pain and the noise and the lights that feels good. The lights begin to move, the noise sketches over my skin like fine sandpaper, the smell of beer sounds like machinery out on the street. Our little show is done, and I consider that my job, just for this moment, is to take all of it, just for a little while longer, just until the show is over.

And, really, what could it hurt.

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The Illuminations

Suzanne Roberts

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Blackpool, England “Oh, Love, I’m afraid your room’s been rented,” the inn keeper said and reached for rose air spray.

She shot a little spurt into the air, covering the smell of smoke and fish ‘n’ chips.

“But we called ahead. You don’t have our reservation?” I asked.

“No, sure don’t, and with the Illuminations going on, you’ll have a hard time of it if you try to find a room.”

My boyfriend, David, and I just stood there, looking at her. We had flown from Los Angeles and taken a train from London. Then a taxi. We had been travelling for two days to get to Blackpool, my mother’s hometown.

“Gotcha,” she said and pointed at us with both index fingers. “You Yankees are so gullible!

Fall for it every time. Welcome to the Silver Birch. I’m Susan, at your service.” She did a little bow and then said, “I have your key right here.” She held the room key, dangling from a Blackpool Tower keychain, between her thumb and index finger.

We both laughed, not because we thought it was funny but because we were both relieved and giddy from jetlag.

We dropped our backpacks in our frilly, rose-scented room, and as tired as we were, headed out to see the famous Blackpool Illuminations, which are like Christmas lights on steroids. A tradition since 1879, the Illuminations feature strings of over a million light bulbs that stretch across over six miles of roadways, creating fanciful and eclectic images of everything from palm trees to astronauts, Alice in Wonderland to warrior Indians.

Whenever someone asks me where my mother is from and the person happens to be British, the response I most often get when I tell them is “My God!”, the word God sounding like it’s spelled with a u and not an o. Or maybe they’ll say, “Oh my. I’m terribly sorry,” and then they’ll hide behind a hand-stifled laugh.

Blackpool is a seaside resort town in northwest England on the Irish Sea. It has been popular with tourists from Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Since very few Americans vacation there, the minute you open your mouth, the taxi driver or waitress will ask you if you know any movie stars.

They will ask you this even if you live in Des Moines or Detroit. But tell them you are from California, or better yet, Los Angeles, and they will assume your neighbors are Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Then to excite them further, tell them of any of your previous star sightings, which will set them off laughing and maybe even win you a “You don’t say!”

Blackpool first gained its fame in the days of tuberculosis, where doctors would order sea air as a cure for consumption, and people travelled north from London to this spot on the Irish Sea. Rumor has it that Blackpool escaped heavy bombing in World War II because Adolf Hitler, who is now memorialized in the wax museum, earmarked the town to remain a place of leisure after his planned invasion.

But with its peep shows, fortune tellers, rock candy, fish ‘n’ chips, casino, the 518-foot tall Blackpool Tower (inspired by the Eiffel Tower), and, of course, the Illuminations that light the night sky from August to November every year, it’s an attempt at Vegas with some of the glitz and all of the kitsch. Nonetheless, it’s my mother’s hometown, and though she refused to return, I would go to see my grandmother in her place.

On the streets of Blackpool, groups of women dressed as naughty school girls, policewomen, sexy pirates, and French maids clamored by, giggling and shivering in the salty air. I bought some postcards and asked the shopkeeper if it was usual to dress up in costume during the Illuminations.

“Oh Love, they’re not dressed up for the Illuminations. They’re havin’ themselves a hen party.”

Blackpool, in all its faded glory, draws stag and hen parties, or bachelor and bachelorette parties as we call them in the States, and the city embraces them with drink deals, peep shows, naughty toys, and boob- and penis-shaped rock candy.

I wanted to go to the wax museum that had given me nightmares as a child.

“Why do you want to go someplace that gave you nightmares?” David asked.

“I was nine,” I said. “I’m sure it isn’t that scary.” Besides that, aren’t we continually trying for a re-do of our childhood, trying to finally get it right?

But as it turns out, I underestimated just how scary Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors truly was. After touring the rock ‘n’ roll rooms, featuring the likes of Michael Jackson, Elton John, Boy George, and, of course, the Beatles; the royalty rooms with Diana, Charles, and the Queen; the politician quarter with Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill; and the iconic Hollywood actors, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, James Dean, and the local favorites, Brad and Angelina, we headed down to the Chamber of Horrors.

I had remembered the mechanical wax show featuring a crocodile chewing off a girl’s leg, which was the source of my nightmares so many years before. But I didn’t remember the special section devoted to serial killers, which was perhaps new since the last time I had visited when I was nine.

Both fictional killers like Frankenstein, Hannibal Lecter, and Freddy Kruger and real murderers, including a huge assortment of American serial killers—their crimes, complete with axes, fake blood, body bags, and nooses—were displayed. Growing up with a British mother, I always knew there was a strange irony and dark humor innate in the British, one that could laugh at the most serious illness or accident, but now that I had seen the Chamber of Horrors as an adult, I could say with confidence that allowing children to view these acts of death was more than a little sadistic.

After the Chamber of Horrors, we tried to get murder off our minds, and went to see the drag show at Funny Girl, but the show had already ended. A woman with a head scarf called, “Get your fortunes told.”

“Let’s do it,” I said.

“Oh come on. Really?”

“Why not?”

“It’s a waste of money.”

“It’ll be fun. We’ll have our fortunes read together.” We walked through the hanging beads to Madame Babushka. “That’s probably not her real name,” I whispered to David. He rolled his eyes, as if to say Really?

I ignored him and said, “My grandmother used to read tea leaves.” Madame Babushka wore her dark hair in a bun and was shaped like a fire plug. I asked her, “Can we have our fortunes read together?”

“Put out your hands,” she said. We did as we were told, face-up and then face-down. “No, I cannot read you together. Absolutely not,” she said. “One at a time.”

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“That’s her way of getting us to pay double,” David whispered to me. Madame heard him and told him it would be the same price, ten pounds each, whether we had our readings done together or separate.

“You go first,” David said. “I’ll wait outside.”

I sat down, and she asked to see my hands again. She focused past me, her gray eyes somewhere on the wall behind my head.

She closed her eyes and spoke: “You have crossed this ocean before.”

“My American accent has given me away.”

She frowned and said, “You have been married, had an abortion, and had a nervous breakdown.”

“I’ve never had a nervous breakdown,” I said.

“Well, trust me, you’ve come close. You have stress marks all over your face.”

I thought about the past year, trying to teach full-time at the community college and pursue a PhD while carrying on a clandestine love affair. I thought about the divorce and the lies. I thought about the poems I never seemed to find time to write. “I’ve been a little stressed,” I admitted.

“A little! I’ll say.”

“Okay. What else?”

“The man outside is not your husband.”

“True.”

“Your husband, he has met someone else, but still, he wants you back, and I see that you still like him. You can’t stick to your decisions, but you must. And you are unhappy in your current relationship.”

“Ex-husband,” I said. “And I’m happy now.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. “You aren’t satisfied. But he will ask you to live with him, this man outside the door, and you will say yes.” At that she shook her head. “Any questions?”

Since she had pretty much covered everything, I asked, “How long will I live?”

Without pause, she said, “Into your eighties. Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said and handed her my ten pounds, which seemed well-earned.

Eighty, I told myself, is a long life.

I walked back out to the smell of fish and chips, beer and the salty sea air. I found David out on the street trying on silly hats. He put on a plaid glengarry and said, “How did it go? Did you get your money’s worth?”

“I think so.”

“What did she say?”

“She said I would live until I’m eighty.”

“Well, that’s good news.”

“Now you go.”

“You know I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“I want to see what she says.”

So while he was in with Madame Babushka, I shopped around, looking at sunglasses, miniatures of the Blackpool Tower, and t-shirts, wondering if I should bring back a souvenir for my mother from her hometown. I settled on a magnet that pictured the Pleasure Beach Ferris wheel with a double decker bus in front.

When David came and found me, I asked, “What did she say?”

“Nothing much,” he said. “What a waste of money.”

Even though I pressed, he wouldn’t tell me anything else. I wondered if she told him the same thing she told me. About us.

At the bar, I sang my Karaoke go-to, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” because it’s a song you can shout rather than sing, and I have the kind of singing voice that has made small children cry and cover their ears.

David sang “Pretty Woman,” which I thought was very romantic because he picked the song for me.

By 10 o’clock, the streets were full of urine and vomit, and most of the hen and stag parties had stumbled off. The party had started early but had also ended early. I understood why people had apologized to me when I admitted that Blackpool was my mother’s hometown.

“You know about Michael, right?” my cousin Emma said when she came in the morning to pick us up.

We got into her car, and I told her I had heard something about that. My mother had taught me to never admit that you know something fully because you might get more information that way.

Or if you do have the vital gossip, you don’t want everyone knowing it. You might not want to tell what you know. Don’t admit too much. Deal in half-truths, fictions, and fairy tales. Change your story often.

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I already knew that my 90-year-old grandmother had a 45-year-old “friend” named Michael.

My mother had told me that in the pub, he called her Aunt Sally, so no one would know what was going on, though everyone did.

“He’s much younger than her, right?” I asked.

“He is,” Emma agreed. “But she keeps him in beer and cigarettes, and if you want to know the truth, I think he’s a bloody scoundrel.”

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Michael opened the door. He was wearing a t-shirt and leather vest with jeans so tight there wasn’t much left to the imagination. As my mother would have said, he was no oil painting. His shaggy black hair hung over his face, and he was smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.

“You want an ale?” he asked us. “This Black Sheep’s a good one.”

“No thanks,” David said.

I wanted one, but as it was, David thought I drank too much, so I declined too. And the last thing I wanted was for Emma to tell the rest of the family how much I “liked the drink.” We already had one cousin die from “the drink.”

Michael led us to Nanny, who was sitting in the living room on a plastic-covered couch. She wore a flowered house dress and had her gray hair piled into a bun. She rested one hand on her cane and the other on her knee. A set of keys was pinned to her dress.

“I’m here,” she said, waving.

“Hi, Nanny,” I said and walked over to hug her.

“Sit here with me, Love. Is it really our Suzanne?”

“Yes, Nanny. It is. And this is my friend David,” I said.

“Come here, Love.” David did as she asked, and she felt his face. “Oh, you’re a bonny lad, I can tell.” Then she turned to me and said, “What happened to your husband?”

“We got a divorce, Nanny.”

“Oh, that’s right. Our Sheila told me something about that.”

I was surprised to witness my grandmother using one of my mother’s signature moves, asking me about something she already knew.

Maybe my mother didn’t want to come back to England because she would be reminded of the ways she had become her own mother.

“What are those keys for?” I asked, pointing to the keys fastened to my grandmother’s house dress.

“Oh, those are the keys to my room upstairs. I can’t make it all that way up the stairs anymore, but it’s where I keep my treasures.” She looked around, and when she was satisfied that Michael was out of earshot, she said, “I’ve got a lot of nice clothes and jewelry, Love. And I don’t want anyone messing with it.”

I was about to ask Nanny if I could go up to see her treasures, but before I had the chance, Emma said, “Nanny, isn’t it great that Suzanne came all the way from America?”

“It’s lovely. Can you see your school pictures there?” She pointed with her cane to a wall that displayed pictures of the queen, the queen mother, and Lady Diana. She also had pictures of her eight grandchildren, my school pictures sent by my mother from America among them.

“I see them, Nanny.”

“Can I touch your face? It’s a shame I can’t see you. But I’ve made my bed, and now I’ve got to lie in it.”

“Sure.” I leaned closer to her. “You can touch my face, but what do you mean about lying in your bed?”

“I had one good eye, and I walked into a pointy plant, and now I can’t see at all. I can’t do me make-up anymore, so that means no more going to the pub for me.” She touched my face and said, “Oh, you’re just like our Sheila. Such a shame she couldn’t come.”

“She sends her love,” I lied. “You can still go to the pub.”

“Oh, no, not without me face on I can’t. Isn’t that right, Michael?”

“Anyone want a beer?” Michael stood in the doorway of the living room.

“Oh, we’re fine in here,” Nanny said. “Do you want anything, Love?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

“Oh, I know. How about a biscuit?” She patted around on her table and presented a tin of cookies to me. “Have one?”

I agreed and took one.

“Give one to your friend there. And some tea?”

“Sure.”

“Michael, put the kettle on, would you?”

Michael disappeared again.

“And while you’re at it, get me my purse,” Nanny called.

“I’ll go help him,” Emma said.

Emma and Michael came back with tea and Nanny’s purse. She fumbled around in it and said, “Here it is. A gift for our Sheila.” She opened a silver change purse and pulled out a string of rhinestones. “You will give it to her, won’t you?”

“I will,” I promised.

“Our Sheila and I were such good friends.”

My mother had told me how they went out to the pub together, how Nanny liked the attention that my young, beautiful mother brought to them.

I remembered being in high school and thinking the same thing about my mother—that we were such good friends. But as I got older, I wanted a mother, not a friend. Months after my father died, my mother and I went to Palm Springs for the weekend, borrowing the condo of the neighbor she was dating. We went out and started talking to some men at the bar. We lied to them, saying we were girlfriends. I added, “We’re bonding.” My intention was for them to leave us alone, but they ended up thinking we were lovers, and they surrounded us.

With Mother as wingman, I brought one of the men home with me. My mother went off to bed, and this strange man and I ended up in the condo hot tub, where I sobered up and realized the mistake I had made. I told him I had to go back to my mother, left him there in the hot tub alone. By then, he didn’t believe she was my mother, couldn’t keep up with the changing story. Who could? The truth seemed like the lie.

Behind my grandmother, a wisp of smoke rose from a nearby lampshade. I got up to have a look, and the light bulb was pressed against the shade. I pulled the burning shade off and said, “Nanny, this shade doesn’t fit the lamp. It’s starting a fire.”

“Is it?” she said.

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“I’ll take it,” David said, and he went into the kitchen to give the shade to Michael. I wondered if the offer still stood for the beer.

“Guess what we found out?” Michael said, lighting a new cigarette. “Here I’ve been calling Sally Auntie all these years, and, would you know it, but we really are related.”

“What do you mean?” Emma asked. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, Sally’s second cousin is my grandmother, so that makes us second cousins or cousins twice removed. I can’t remember how it goes, do you Sally?”

“No, I can’t,” Nanny said. “But isn’t that a coincidence?”

“Is that really true, Nanny?” Emma asked.

“It is,” Nanny said with a solemn nod.

The color drained from Emma’s face, and she said, “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

“Why don’t you all go?” Nanny said. “I’m getting a bit tired.”

We said our goodbyes, and as we walked to Emma’s car, she said, “If Michael is her cousin, do you know what that means?” She clutched her stomach. I nodded, thinking she meant that Nanny had been having sex with her cousin, and I wasn’t sure whether that was any better or worse than their forty-year age difference.

“It means,” Emma said, “That Michael is our cousin, too.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“We’re related. To him.”

Emma took David and me to the house where our mothers grew up at 17 Bristol Avenue. “My mother was born in that house,” she said. “Yours was too.”

Mother had always insisted she wasn’t born at home, but what did it matter? I had learned that the version of the story that was true was the one you believed.

Even so, part of me knew the storyline I was creating for myself wasn’t true. I had a different lover, but I hadn’t changed. At least not in any real way. I told myself I did the brave thing by leaving my husband. It’s true that I had disrupted my life. I hadn’t yet done the scary thing of being alone. I wanted to travel and see the world, but I was too afraid to be a grown-up and go by myself. I wasn’t ready to make the connections before me, to my own mother, to the old woman sitting on the couch.

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The stone row houses leaned up against each other. The red paint was chipping and dog droppings and weeds littered the cracked sidewalks. I thought about the stories my mother had told me, about her first kiss in that alleyway, about the woman who hobbled down the road on two sticks, and her twenty-one kids, who all shit in the bathtub because one toilet wasn’t enough. And the neighbor with the clubbed foot, who, according to Mother, would do it with anyone for a packet of Woodbines. I wondered which house Jack Smith, who got his sister pregnant, lived in. And where the neighbor whose husband shot her for carrying on with the milkman had lived. I tried to imagine my great grandma Smith, leaning on a bent elbow, shouting, “What? What’s that?” No one paying her any mind.

But I couldn’t match the stories to the place, stories that always seemed to run the same reel as the grainy black-and-white pictures I had seen. Stories that were part memory, part imagination— both my mother’s and my own. Even so, I loved the stories, asked my mother to tell me them again and again. Although my father was the writer, I inherited storytelling from my mother. Each trait I

didn’t want to inherit was inextricably bound to the traits I embraced. Sometimes you have to lie to tell a good story. Could I choose what I wanted to take and what to leave behind? I didn’t know the answer, but I had found the question.

“It’s too bad your mother won’t come see her mother,” David said. “How long has it been?”

“A long time,” I said. “The last time she came to England, I think I was nine or maybe ten.”

“Why hasn’t she been back? When I asked her, she just kept changing the subject.”

I could tell him that she didn’t like to travel, which was true, but she already told him that herself. Or that she didn’t want to spend the money. Also true. Finally I said, “Because she doesn’t want to.”

“But why doesn’t she want to?” he asked.

The why is always more complicated than the what. Could I tell him that her mother drowned their kittens? That she cooked Mother’s pet rabbit for dinner? Would any of that seem unreasonable during the war years?

Could I tell him that Nanny went to the pub every day and made the kids cook dinner? That she locked the front door from the outside, so they couldn’t get out, or at least this was the story that my mother told and then later retracted, telling me, “I never said that.”

But here are the stories Mother stands by: Nanny looked the other way when her husband asked their daughters for a kiss on the lips on New Year’s Eve. She introduced my teenaged mother to a 50-year old married man who gave my grandmother presents in return.

So I said, “She didn’t have a happy childhood. She wants to leave the past in the past.”

What my mother had told me to say made the most sense after all. At least to me.

David nodded, and I was glad that this vague answer seemed to satisfy him.

“Thanks for coming with me. I know having a tea party with an old woman isn’t much of a holiday.”

“I was glad to come,” David said. “I’m happy to meet your family. Your grandmother is very

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sweet.” He kissed me on the forehead.

I felt sure that Madame Babushka was a con artist.

“She’s nice,” I said. “And she seemed to like you.”

“I’m a bonny lad,” David said.

“That you are.”

Though I knew my mother’s stories, I couldn’t connect the tales of my grandmother’s cruelty to that old, blind woman sitting on a plastic-covered couch. I knew David wouldn’t be able to understand. I didn’t even understand. The thing I knew for certain was that David’s family seemed less complicated, more normal, and I wanted to believe mine was too. So having a “sweet grandmother” felt good.

Maybe that’s why I vowed to get my mother back to England before her mother died. That would be the right thing to do, the normal thing. My mother might see that Nanny wasn’t the mean version that lived inside her head.

Or maybe I knew that my grandmother and my mother both live inside of me, and I wanted them to reconcile. Maybe then I could untangle the mess of characteristics and choose the ones I want to keep and let go of the others. They were both survivors, but their main pathway to survival was denial. I had learned to live that way too.

I was ready to stop pretending.

For me, that meant travel, getting away from the framework I had built and really being with myself—the deep self that I kept hidden away like a photograph in a locket. Everyone said, “You will have to come back eventually and face reality.”

But that’s what I was doing by travelling. Reality can live inside the escape—where the scaffolding that holds us to something we call home falls away, and we have no choice but to face ourselves, where we have to question our narratives, the stories about ourselves that were never really true.

Travelling to England was a going away, but it was also a way to come home.

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Alice Lowe

Lillie’s Legacy

You go to Coit Tower for the view from high atop Telegraph Hill. On a clear day you can see all of San Francisco, its heights and hills and snaking roads arrayed for your viewing pleasure, and the waters that surround it, dotted by islands—Alcatraz, Angel, Treasure—and spanned by bridges, the Golden Gate to the west with Mt. Tamalpais rising from beyond its northern reach, the Bay Bridge and the Richmond-San Rafael, gateways to points east. You take the elevator to the observation deck at the tower’s 210-foot pinnacle—you have to do it at least once. After that you may, like me, find the tower’s other attributes as appealing as the view.

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A bust of Lillie Hitchcock Coit graces the tower’s entrance and piqued my curiosity on an early visit.

Who was she to have this monument named after her? Reading the biographical sketch on the statue I found intimations of a colorful character—more than just a rich San Francisco matron—enough to send me delving into her history.

The Hitchcock family emigrated west, Kentucky to San Francisco, in 1851 when Lillie was seven. My family emigrated west, New York to San Francisco, a century later, when I was six. Comparisons end there, as Lillie was bolder than I could have imagined being. She first made headlines as a teenager when she rallied bystanders to help the crew of Knickerbocker Engine Company Number Five douse a blaze on Telegraph Hill. The squad adopted her as their mascot, and she rode with them to fires, wore her honorary uniform at parades and banquets. They awarded her a diamond-studded gold badge, which she wore for the rest of her life and beyond. She was cremated with it at the age of eighty-six.

The mid-nineteenth century wasn’t an easy time for women to make their way in the world, even in the feverish and free-spirited Gold Rush days of the Wild West. It helped to marry money, which Lillie did at the age of twenty. It helped to stand out, even for eccentric and scandalous behavior, and “Firebelle Lil,” as she was known, made a big splash. Money and notoriety may have helped in the mid-twentieth century as well, but I didn’t inherit, marry, or otherwise acquire wealth and hadn’t the nerve or confidence to attempt anything outrageous. That was Lillie’s fascination for me.

There must be something in our genetic makeup that plants us on one side or another—extrovert or introvert, daring iconoclast or timid wallflower.

Lillie shocked San Francisco society. She smoked cigars and drank bourbon. She wore trousers long before it was acceptable for women and would dress like a man to get into North Beach’s male-only gambling establishments. She once hosted a boxing match in her hotel room. She didn’t champion women’s rights—she just refused to let obstacles stand in her way.

She became a wealthy widow at forty, after which she lived much of the time in Europe, where she was a favorite at the court of Napoleon III. She traveled back and forth, but she returned to San Francisco to stay toward the end of her life. She called it her soul city—I could well do the same—and Coit Tower was her gift of gratitude. She died in 1929 and bequeathed money to the City of San Francisco “for the purpose of adding beauty to the City which I have always loved.” Coit Tower was built in 1933 on Telegraph Hill, the site of the first Western Telegraph Station. Lillie and her celebrated youthful feat, immortalized on a high hill.

I’m too old to be seeking role models, or am I? Surely there is no age at which we’re supposed to stop searching for inspiration. Lillie Coit isn’t, or wasn’t, my idea of mentor material, and yet the more I

learned about her, the more she came to symbolize qualities that intrigue and elude me: her defiance and grit, her particular brand of spiritedness. Her appeal to me is in those characteristics that make her so idiosyncratic, so unlike me.

My research uncovered the dichotomy that she embodied. I found her in Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era, a factual but flippant compendium of femmes fatales: brazen brides, lascivious libertines, wanton wordsmiths, and other often alliterative classifications. Lillie Coit could have qualified for multiple placements—gutsy gamblers, rabble rousers, scandalous socialites—but she is designated an “incendiary ingénue,” one of several “tough lovers and fiery sirens.” Among her inflammatory claims to fame: she was said to have been engaged fifteen times before she was twenty, sometimes simultaneously.

Lillie takes on a different persona, perhaps more reputable and praiseworthy, in another book, Women Trailblazers of California: Pioneers to the Present. Its diverse subjects—suffragists and conservationists, educators and entertainers—were chosen for notable accomplishments previously denied to women. Here Lillie is a “settler,” noteworthy for her role as San Francisco’s volunteer firefighter.

Her pioneer status also was recognized in a 2005 exhibit at U.C. Berkeley, “Our Collective Voice: The Extraordinary Work of Women in California.” There she kept company with labor activist Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers’ Union and Lola Montez, who danced in mining camps and kept a pet grizzly bear.

I can’t help but wonder: where were these women—the artists and activists, pioneers and philosophers—when I was growing up without a vision for what and how I might do and be? Where was Lillie, who might have given me a taste for boldness? I grew up in a vacuum, a working-class environment in which I was steered away from serious scholarship and into typing and shorthand classes that would prepare me for office work after high school. Women of achievement were outside my vision through the years that I married, had a child, and divorced while holding a series of secretarial jobs. I didn’t aspire to more until I was in my mid-thirties, facing a grim and tedious future.

Going back to college was probably the most audacious act of my life—maybe a burst of Lillie-like chutzpah after all—and those five years at university opened up worlds previously barred to me. That’s where I became aware of potential mentors and role models as they paraded past me—the brilliant, creative, ambitious, accomplished, dedicated women from past and present, women whose lives and attainments might have come to my rescue earlier if I’d known about them. Patricia Hampl tells about finding her personal hero, Katherine Mansfield: “It was the early 1970s,” she writes, “and we were supposed to be ‘discovering’ women writers, wedging them into the literary canon any which way.” George Eliot, George Sand, Jean Rhys, Colette, so many, waiting to be unearthed and claimed by eager young college women. I was an eager, older college woman in the ‘80s, like the middle-aged protagonist in The Christmas Letters by Lee Smith who sees herself as a stereotype when she goes back to school: “one of those women you see on every college campus these days, those fiftyish women with half-frame reading glasses and denim skirts and Aerosole shoes, streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail, kicking along through the leaves, on fire with Woolf or whoever.” I was fortyish, and the reading glasses came a few years later; otherwise she had me, down to the Aerosoles, the ponytail, and Virginia Woolf.

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Now, years later, Lillie and her tower symbolize a juncture in which I feel the need to revisit and sort through the paradoxes of my journey. I pay homage at Lillie’s statue and look to it and the murals that encircle the interior walls of Coit Tower as if in anticipation of a sign, of sage advice or prophecy for my future. The murals have become intertwined with Lillie although they have no tangible relationship to her beyond their location. You could say that she introduced me to them, and it’s she who challenges me to make connections, to mine them for insights.

The murals portray various aspects of the country’s commerce and industry, from farms to factories, Wall Street to the streets of San Francisco. They were commissioned and created during the Depression through a federal employment program, the Public Works of Art Project. One panel showcases California’s agricultural heritage: women cut and gather flowers while the men harvest fruit. Workers in the orange trees balance on rickety ladders, carrying galvanized buckets in one hand as they reach for the fruit with the other. It brings back memories of a summer I spent picking cherries in Washington State. We wore molded plastic containers harnessed around our necks and backs, which freed us to pick fruit with both hands, but the ladders were still shaky.

I’m bothered by the negligible role of women in the frescoes, relegated to working on assembly lines, harvesting low-growing crops, taking dictation and lunch orders. I suppose the twenty-six muralists, two women among them, were reflecting life as they saw it, but this vision of reality seems regrettably narrow. Where’s lithe Lillie with a firehose, louche Lillie in a gambling hall? A section depicting a library displays painted bookshelves with book spines that brandish names like Hemingway and Faulkner, Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx, among rows and rows of volumes by notable authors and scholars, all male. Conspicuously absent are women of the same era who made significant literary, cultural, and political contributions, American and British writers and theorists like Mary Shelley, Rebecca West, Eudora Welty, Emma Goldman, and—most flagrantly to me—Virginia Woolf.

These women might have been my educational inspiration, just as Lillie could have been a sorely-needed icon of unconventionality. Still, I’m not looking to revisit regrets or assign blame.

While I may have passed my youth in a cultural and intellectual bubble, an oxygen-starved seedling in a bell jar, I have them all now with their cumulative history. I have the tower with its murals and Lillie Coit.

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Coit Tower was draped in scaffolding, closed for renovation on my last trip to San Francisco. Now it sparkles in a crystal-clear sky on this spring-like January day. I arrive early and sun myself on the east-facing lawn as I await the 10:00 opening. A panorama of sight and sound transpires from far and near: the ant-trails of traffic crossing the Bay Bridge, the vivid greens and reds and shrieks of the wild parrots that inhabit surrounding trees, a nimble golden retriever who brings me her spittle-soaked tennis ball to toss back out again and again—will she never tire?—until her owner whistles, and they toddle off together.

I greet Lillie when the doors open, while the other early visitors head straight for the elevator.

I admire the pristine murals unobstructed, leaning over the railing to study each panel as if for the first time, finding minutiae I missed on previous viewings.

In the official guidebook, Coit Tower: Its History and Art, I’ve learned that there are more murals on another level, not accessible to the public. An attendant in the gift shop tells me they’ve

just been restored during this last closure and are now open for restricted viewing, but the docent who conducts the private tours isn’t here today. I tell him it’s the only day I can be here on this trip.

Please, I ask, is there some way? An older man, tall and distinguished-looking with a neat gray beard, appears behind him and says, “Come around here.” I expect him to show me more photographs of the mystery murals, but he leads me past them to an unmarked, closed door next to the elevator. “It’s slow this morning,” he says. “I’ll give you a five-minute tour.”

My mind stirs with images of secret chambers and worlds behind wardrobes as he unlocks the door. We stand at the bottom of a narrow, circular staircase lined with murals. “Please don’t touch anything,” he cautions as he shows me why the space has been closed off—the frescoes are inches away, unprotected from curious fingers. As we move up the stairs, we’re accompanied on both sides by a teeming procession climbing Powell Street, from the foot of Market Street to the cable car kiosk at the top of the hill. Most of the figures have been identified, he tells me, local personalities and friends of the artist. I ask about Lillie, hoping to find her in this panoply of city life, but she’s not among the crowd.

I see more murals on the landing at the top of the stairs, and then my guide escorts me back downstairs. I leave Coit Tower high on the serendipity of my experience, afloat in the balmy breeze off the bay. What to make of it all? How do I assemble these mismatched bits of memory and history—mine and Lillie’s, the tower and the murals—into a cohesive and tangible hypothesis, that sign I’ve been seeking? Or maybe my present feeling of satiety is the sign I’ve sought.

Another Lillie comes to mind, fictional painter Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Her struggles as a woman artist in the early twentieth century are captured by a painting she’s been unable to finish. Her breakthrough comes when she draws an otherwise inconsequential line through the center, and it transforms her canvas from blurred to clear, from tentative to complete.

The narrator says, “it was finished.”

The moment comes when you realize you’ve achieved your goal with a single brush stroke, a word or sign. I haven’t done anything shocking or heroic. But like Lillie, I’ve paved my own way. And my mentors and muses, Lillie among them, came along in their own good time to illuminate my path.

I head down Telegraph Hill to the Ferry Landing for a celebratory lunch.

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A Journal of Creative Nonfiction

Elizabeth Mosier

I Have, I Fear, the Literary Temperament

February 28, 1920, gray, cold, dull “I used to feel that having big thoughts and feeling deeply were a sign of greatness and that I was marked, so to speak. Query: Can I write? Is this an indication of the good taste of Bryn Mawr or my vile style?”

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These words, written by Bryn Mawr College freshman Dorothy Burr Thompson ’23, reminded me of my own adolescent musings, source material for my first published novel, My Life as a Girl. When I wrote the book, I’d just begun teaching creative writing at Bryn Mawr College in the same building where I’d once conferenced with my freshman English professor. Fifteen years later, the psychological landscape of the campus was different because I was; in order to access the awe and insecurity I’d felt as a student, I had to excavate my past. I dug up my old fears and failures (detailed in journals I kept from 1980 to 1984) as well as my grand plans and successes (headlined in letters home) in order to remember what I thought and felt at seventeen. At that age, I entered Bryn Mawr’s class of 1984 with my brilliant and far-better-prepared classmates, through a gate opened by legendary Director of Admissions Elizabeth Vermey ’58.

That distance from my own undergrad experience had doubled again by the time I was invited to participate in a course called “Women’s Higher Education in the 19th & 20th Centuries: The History of Bryn Mawr College.” The course paired alumnae with current students to conduct an archival research project, beginning with participants’ biographies. I responded to the coordinator’s query via email, telling her that my life, like anyone’s, had been shaped by forces I couldn’t have anticipated.

Only in retrospect could I plot my career as a coherent series of events along a rising action line leading to an M.F.A. in creative writing and work as a writer and teacher. As if this were the inevitable conclusion to a story of a girl from Phoenix who studied psychology at Bryn Mawr and planned to earn a Ph.D. The alumna we investigated, Dorothy Burr Thompson, did the opposite; she entered Bryn Mawr as a writer (she’d penned poems and stories and a novel draft, Marjorie, at Miss Hill’s School in Philadelphia) and exited as a renowned scholar of classical archaeology. As I learned before reading her 1919-1923 diaries, she graduated summa cum laude, specialized in ancient Greek terra cotta art, and lived to be 101. Knowing what Dorothy had accomplished in her long, productive, fruitful career diffused the narrative tension in her life story. But for me, this answer to the question of how she made use of her education only brought her urgent personal query—Can I write?—into greater relief.

I remember asking myself the same question in college; my students, in conference, asked it of me.

Dorothy could write. In fact, she published more than 50 scholarly papers and books on her excavation work in Athens. Her life-spanning diaries in the Bryn Mawr College Archives (beyond the three volumes my research partner and I examined) reveal that she wrote fiction and poetry into her forties, and yet this work isn’t mentioned in her New York Times obituary. This omission troubled me; perhaps realizing that a complex life with conflicting ambitions might be abstracted to fit an archive box or a column of type is what directed my attention to the subtext of Dorothy’s story. “There will be a box here for you one day,” another student told me, as we sat across from each other—Youth facing Middle Age—at a table in the Coombe Special Collections Reading Room in Canaday Library.

And so, as my partner set out to investigate how Dorothy prepared for Bryn Mawr’s entrance exam and rigorous coursework, I focused on her literary aspirations—and the role our alma mater played in altering the arc of her life.

Monday, September 22, 1919 “Four years of college should prove whether I have a right to write or should take up a manlier way of life.”

Bryn Mawr College, founded in 1885 by pragmatic Quakers (and shaped by its formidable first dean and second president, M.Carey Thomas, who set an agenda for “solid and scientific” instruction), was in some ways an unlikely choice for a young woman who declared herself a “literary type.” With its rigorous curriculum and graduate schools, Bryn Mawr broadcast its academic mission as the first American institution where women could earn the Ph.D. degree. Creative writing was not yet part of the curriculum. And practically speaking, the long list of required courses in English, philosophy, math, science, Greek, Latin, and two modern languages left Dorothy even less time for outlining her new novel (working title: Youth) than I would have six decades later, as I fulfilled slightly less onerous divisional requirements.

Like Dorothy, I felt the pressure of Bryn Mawr’s mission, but thanks to the women who came before me, I never felt I had to “take up a manlier way of life” to justify my education there. I chose a women’s college, in part, so that I could forget I was female. For four years, I was free of the qualifier that so often came with any accolade: “That’s good (work or reasoning or writing) for a girl.” I owe that freedom to my alma mater.

But when Dorothy matriculated in 1919—post-Armistice, pre-Suffrage—Bryn Mawr still had much to prove about what women and women’s colleges could do. Reading between the lines of Dorothy’s diary entries, it seemed to me that Bryn Mawr—M.Carey Thomas embodied in Collegiate Gothic architecture—was the perfect dramatic setting for the conflict Dorothy identified in her diary: would she be an artist or an academic? Though her fateful meeting with by-then-President Thomas wouldn’t occur until Dorothy was a sophomore, Thomas was already an antagonist of sorts in the internal struggle that intensified during her undergraduate years.

August 8, 1920 clear, warm, soft

Oh, such a soft summer day, peaceful and dreary, ill fit for recording turbulent and petty feelings!

Yet I must. I have, I fear, the literary temperament—capable of being happy only in writing, however foolish may be my ideas. Every day I have promised myself an orgy in the empty inviting blank book…”

By sophomore year, though Dorothy laments being “gradually weighed down by study to less artistic tasks,” she begins using her diary as a writer does, to practice her craft and articulate her emerging literary aesthetic. Her entries change in content and style; self-analysis becomes literary criticism (she admires Jane Austen and Ivan Turgenev) and ruminations on her friendships turn to development of her characters. “Malcolm is dead,” she writes on September 13, 1920—and I have to re-read the passage several times before I understand that Malcolm is not a friend or family member, but her fictional creation. “Perhaps it is wrong,” she adds, “or rather, inadvisable, to suffer so much for an imaginary pain…” Her entries from this year reflect new awareness of herself as a protagonist in a story of collegiate self-invention. In one passage, she refers to her eponymous first novel, reflecting,

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“I always knew Marjorie was myself.”

Again and again in her diaries, Dorothy pits the “literary type” (such as her brilliant friend D.W., to whom she “confided all my schemes and hopes”) against the “scientific personality” (typified by her math professor, Anna Pell). She pursues these women’s divergent stories as a novelist does, perhaps seeking resolution to her personal conflict. By spring of sophomore year, D.W. makes the “upper ten” for the European Fellowship that Dorothy covets; by spring of junior year, she withdraws from Bryn Mawr after suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Dorothy’s wariness is informed by these dramatic events, which reinforce her own associations: inspiration with depression, dullness with mental and physical health. Throughout her diaries she expresses this dichotomous view, but never as succinctly as in her entry on February 28, 1920: “I’d write tonight, but curiously, I feel vigorous, but uninspired, like a strong cow.”

On December 21, 1920, Dorothy presents (in dialogue with stage directions) a pointed conversation with “Miss P” that takes place in her home, called “Yarrow.” As the two women speak, Anna Pell’s odd, “dog-like” husband Alexander shuffles in and out of the room, muttering that his wife is “crazy” and that he and she are “incompatible equations.”

D—Why am I more stupid as I go on?

Miss P—Misdirected energy, Miss Burr.

D—Must one give up everything, and health?

Miss P—Almost (pathetically but unsentimentally). You must make a great many sacrifices; it is an isolated life. You can’t talk about your work to any one. But Mathematicians don’t consider—they go straight ahead. (Bursting through reserve.) It’s the most wonderful thing in the world.

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A month later, on January 27, 1921, Dorothy depicts another visit to Anna Pell at Yarrow to deliver a puzzle she’s promised to bring. “Her eyes were red and swollen and her face white,” she notes, signaling an important scene with slower pacing and sensory detail. “I was embarrassed to meet her, so I chatted jauntily on about Miss Blake, engines, puzzles, etc. trying to set on myself as theatrical and romantic in imagining that she had been crying.” Mrs. Pell takes the puzzle, though her manner is odd, and Dorothy feels unwelcome. “I got out quickly,” she reflects, as she builds to her point, “without knowing exactly why.”

Later, she’s shocked to learn from another professor that Alexander Pell had died from a stroke just that morning. “That that provincial, untrivial, earnest woman should have received me so undramatically, even tho’ she was in undoubted sorrow… a few hours after her husband’s death—is a triumph of the scientific personality,” she concludes. “A literary woman could not have been so matter of fact.” Dorothy presents the scene as more evidence of her own different temperament, but her writing also reveals an instinct for characterization. As it turns out, her portrait of the strange Mr. Pell was prescient. More than eighty years later, Richard Pipes would make the case in The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia that “Alexander Pell” was in fact notorious Russian terrorist Sergei Degaev, accomplice to the murder of Tsar Alexander II, leading a double life as the husband of Bryn Mawr’s math department chair.

Now that’s a story—one Dorothy might have written.

Sophomore year was a turning point for Dorothy, as it was for me. That year, my Developmental Psychology professor noted that my paper on the autistic 4-year-old girl I’d observed in a

field placement contained more description than data; I was clearly more intrigued by her character than by her diagnosis. By senior year, in my Cognitive Issues seminar, I was studying the psychology of language, writing papers about prototype theory and metaphorical thinking. I was testing my “right to write” too—taking a feature journalism class at the University of Pennsylvania, interning at Philadelphia Magazine, and publishing a bi-weekly editorial column in the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Bi-College News. And then one day in senior seminar, my professor, Clark McCauley, surprised me by saying he’d read my column. “Good work,” he said casually, kindly. “You’re going to make a living writing one day.” This essay, drafted 30 years later, is just one fragment of my gratitude for the encouragement I heard—still hear—in my professor’s words.

Saturday, April 22, 1922 clear, cool, brilliant “Pt said to Uncle Earnest, “She is our best student”—I am elated, inspired—those murky misgivings and suicidal agonies retreat to deeper corners—though never do they entirely vanish. This is my clear ambition—honor by those I respect. More I demand still of course—honor from the world beyond academic doors—“ Pt? I wondered as I read. The instant I understood the initials stood for President Thomas, I imagined M. Carey’s hand upon Dorothy’s shoulder, conferring her status—and sealing her fate. Though Dorothy had yet to choose her profession, she’d been chosen. She’d been launched on a scholarly trajectory when her novelist mother, Anna Robeson Burr, first suggested a career in archaeology; she’d gained momentum when she declared a double major in Classical archaeology and Greek. Now, with the president’s endorsement and high praise from professors Rhys Carpenter and Mary Swindler, she set her sights on winning Bryn Mawr’s European Fellowship—a prize that would cover a year of study in Greece, where she would begin the work that defined her life.

And yet, those archive boxes full of Dorothy’s words tell another story: that the work that fills our days is not always what we’re remembered for.

My students in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr were smart, talented and well-trained to critically examine themes in literature—but they didn’t all share the “literary temperament.” Some of the best writers I taught were math and physics majors who learned, right along with English majors pursuing minors in creative writing, to think as writers—to understand and apply literary technique to produce a desired effect on the page.

In class, we talked about different kinds of story endings, including resonant images like James Joyce’s “snow falling faintly through the universe” at the end of “The Dead.” I told my students that stories don’t need to resolve neatly to be meaningful. If the writer has done her work with scene and exposition and sensory detail, the reader will feel that what has happened mattered—that the events depicted have brought about a transformation that opens the story instead of tying it up.

Later, at my writing desk, I shuffle through several possible endings to Dorothy’s narrative.

May Day? Commencement? The chance reunion with math professor Agnes Scott while out walking on April 8, 1923? This last image is almost too perfect: Miss Scott, one of M. Carey Thomas’s first

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hires and true stars, contradicts Dorothy’s idea of the “scientific personality” as she warmly greets her former student “who deserted mathematics” and gives her a bouquet of pansies picked from her garden. “Just so you do one thing thoroughly, that’s all that matters,” Dr. Scott says. Dorothy, seemingly as surprised and touched as I am by her words, asks, “Was I wrong to leave the influence of such a spirit?”

Chronologically, this entry is nearer to the end of Dorothy’s college years than the ending I have in mind. It also makes a point—perhaps too neatly—that there can be no definite resolution to Dorothy’s dilemma. In this same passage—one week after winning the coveted European Fellowship and being feted by professors and classmates and family—Dorothy is dismayed to hear that Rhys Carpenter (a name I know as the multi-million dollar addition to Bryn Mawr’s art history and archaeology library) has described her “heart’s desire” as archaeology. She writes, “I almost want to scream ‘No, no, no”; to write and only to write and if not that—to create, be it but buttons!” Finally, I decide that Dorothy’s character had been sufficiently illuminated by the story she’s told in her diaries; her “clear ambition—honor by those I respect” has been fulfilled. And I end instead with an image of Dorothy from three weeks earlier, as she awaits word of her brilliant future from her room in Pembroke Hall:

Thursday, March 15, 1923 clear, cold, brilliant “This week has been a worse strain than the war zone—and then I was watching for Death! But the slow tightening of the web that draws me inescapably to the centre—ie: tonight when finally, undeniably, I shall know about the European Fellowship. After 4 years of doubt, it comes as a high culmination, particularly by so much drama…”

Later 8:00 pm The lights in Taylor make me uncommon nervous…

10:30 In an hour, it is about helpless!

10:50 All over! The letter, secured by adhesive tape, lies under the covers—and here’s for a good sleep! …So quiet a night for all these years! I rather hate to have it go!”

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Our Contributors Sarah Carson was born and raised in Michigan but now lives in Chicago. She is the author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections: Poems in which You Die (BatCat Press, 2014) and Buick City (Mayapple Press, 2015). Sometimes she blogs at sarahmycarson.com.

Melinda Copp has an MFA from Goucher College. “Alligator Nature and Nurture” is an excerpt from a larger work of narrative nonfiction about alligators in the human world. She lives in Bluffton, South Carolina, and can be found online at www.melindacopp.com.

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Adrian Koesters’ nonfiction and essays have appeared in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Under the Gum Tree, and in the anthology Becoming: What Makes a Woman (University of Nebraska (2012)). Her nonfiction book on spirituality, Healing Mysteries, was published by Paulist Press (2005) and her collection of poems, Many Parishes, was published by BrickHouse Books (2013). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a Ph.D. in fiction and poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She taught creative writing at UNL and the Creighton University MFA program, and currently is the editorial research specialist for Grants Resources at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Volume 3 Issue 2 Winter 2015 Alice Lowe reads and writes about food and family, Virginia Woolf, and life. Her personal essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Permafrost, Upstreet, Hippocampus, Tinge, Switchback, and Prime Number. She was the 2013 national award winner at City Works Journal and winner of a 2011 essay contest at Writing It Real. Work on Virginia Woolf includes two monographs published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London. Alice lives in San Diego, California and blogs at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Elizabeth Mosier’s nonfiction has appeared most recently in the HerStories Voices column, Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. Her essay, “Believers,” was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2015. A seven-year volunteer technician for the Independence National Park Archaeology Laboratory, she is at work on a collection of essays on archaeology, memory, and home.

Dawn Newton received an M.A. in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Baltimore Review, Gargoyle, the South Carolina Review, So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art, and other literary magazines. She is presently completing a memoir, Stage IV: Mother on Tarceva, and lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband, three children, and gal pal Clover.

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the award-wining memoir Almost Somewhere, as well as four collections of poetry. She teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College and for the low residency MFA programs in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College and Chatham.

Ben Wirth is a writer and academic living in Seattle. He holds an MFA from the University of Washington, where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English.

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A Journal of Creative Nonfiction