Starting something.. (a day late)

Jacob spent most of the trip wishing Gemma was being a complete bitch. He didn't just want her to be awful to him, he wanted her to be awful to other people too. He wished she was rude to waiters and waitresses, instead she--independent of him, because he did the same thing--carefully stacked up her plates for them. When someone at the theater was bumped into her, almost knocking her down (and turned out to be an old lady there to see the show because she'd been in it years before when it had first opened on Broadway), he wished she would have yelled at her, instead of asking if they could get a coffee or a piece of pie after the show to talk about it.

Mostly Jacob spent the trip hating himself, because there wasn't a single good reason he shouldn't have been in love with Gemma. He'd lay in bed at night and his eyes would tear up with his self-loathing. Then he'd get even more upset with himself for being such a jerk and he'd think about telling her he was a jerk and then he'd wonder whether he was any more special of a jerk than anyone else. If what he was experiencing was normal. If self-loathing was just a facet of dating and he'd somehow missed it until now; maybe it had been the failing factor, why he was still single at thirty-one.

"What are you reading?" she asked him at breakfast. Their hotel had a restaurant, which wasn't complementary, and then a breakfast buffet, which was included. He'd woken before her and gone down to the buffet, just because it meant free coffee and donuts.

He showed her the book, a legal mystery (Jacob didn't think of them as thrillers unless the protagonists life was in danger and, in this one, it wasn't) he'd gotten from the shelf in the room. They were staying at a hotel with books in the rooms. In New York City. Because someone was going to run out of things to do. Then again, when Jacob had gone to San Francisco the year before, he ended up sitting around the pool hating himself for reading a Michael Crichton novel, but it wasn't like he stopped reading it (or went out and did anything touristy).

"Is it any good?"

He wanted her to take the book, which was a reviewer's copy in hardcover, and bash his head in. He really did. He stopped himself in the middle of the thought and considered it and decided he was correct. He really did feel so bad talking to her, he wanted her to cave his skull in so he wouldn't have to be such a shit to her anymore.

But, of course, he just shrugged and told her it was "all right."

They went for breakfast across the street at a diner, which was better than the hotel restaurant for breakfast food. CHeaper too. But Jacob was spending way above the budget for the trip; he recognized his actions--he figured spending a fortune would make it more likely she'd have a good time and regret it less later--and accepted them.

She got the french toast and he got an omelette. She got orange juice, he got coffee.

He kept bargaining with himself during the breakfast, trying to make himself feel better, like less of a jerk. Like if he told her she'd somehow obsolve him of all the guilt, like she'd immediately understand and forgive him. Or maybe she'd just laugh and tell him it didn't matter.

Jacob was terrified he'd some day end up in AA--which seemed unlikely, given it being, essentially, a Christian organization and wholly dependent on one prostrating him or herself to a superior being--and he'd have to do the apology step and he'd have to apologize to her. He just wanted to get through the trip. There were plenty of things Jacob already hated himself for, plenty of people he'd hurt worse--there was the woman who had to take the morning after pill and she got sick from it and Jacob made her feel guilty for not having condoms (he figured, at the very least, Gemma was getting a nice vacation)--so knew he could take it, but Jacob didn't know very many nice people. With Gemma, he was probably exploiting the nicest person he knew, in fact.

He knew, even if he told her, even if she knew, she wouldn't hate him for it. She wouldn't even be mad about it. She might be a little hurt, but she'd understand. He didn't want her to understand. He wanted her to reach across the table with her syrup-coated knife and stab him in the hand.

It was during this trip, maybe for the first time, Jacob realized he really didn't like himself. He usually just let that feeling pass, not take too much off of him; but watching her eat her French toast, sip her orange juice, smile at him, talk about the trip, Jacob knew just what a jerk he was being to her. And he was never going to forgive himself for it.`

a section of a piece

“I’m just going to say it one more time,” Bastion instructed without looking at her, “but I’d really prefer it if you went away.”

But apparently it didn’t matter what Bastion preferred. She didn’t hop down, and as he looked back over his shoulder, he could see the top of her head as she sunk further down against the back of his seat. He sighed. Probably she would die on his watch; likely it was always scripted in the stars, maybe the Catfish constellation, or maybe the one he had recently named the Gangrenous Clubfoot. Its lower right star, there twinkling and grinning at him, him grinning back as he tentatively puffed the cigar Will had given him. That star, that very one: thou shalt be doomed to be at fault when thy sister dies. But also it will be due to her sheer perverse stubbornness, and your unwillingness to do anything but sigh and press on, he also told himself, irritated with his own passivity as he tentatively reached out his hand and pulled the lever back into gear again. First gear though. What with Merlot sitting behind him, primed and ready to fall out under a enormous wheel, and the deep and sloppy mud that had been showing up from under the thin billowing grass that the tractor trundled over: probably best to stay in first.

The machine grunted forward as Bastion put a little pressure on the pedal, and then jerked to a stop when Bastion gasped at the suddenness of the movement and stomped his foot back on the brake. Same as a car, same as a car, he chanted to himself, and it was almost true except that nobody had taught him how to drive a stick shift, and also the gas pedal on the tractor appeared to have forward and reverse built into it, depending on which way you rocked the pedal. Stupid system, he thought, and tried to press his heel down instead to get the tractor into a better position to rocket through the two small alder he was trying to squeeze between. Behind him Merlot snickered.

“Are you planning on going anywhere? Or just sit here belching all day?”

“You just shut up, or I’ll push you off myself,” he responded. “I didn’t ask you to come along.” As a matter of fact, Bastion had thought he had certainly gotten up early enough to make sure she didn’t tag along, but just as Bastion maneuvered the machine out of Will’s garage and down the driveway to the hedge, she had darted so quickly in front of him that he had nearly screamed in fright. Indeed it was fortunate that the damn machine was so slow, because otherwise he would have already fulfilled his destiny and mushed her quite to a pulp.

“Ho!” she had shouted as she scrambled up the back of the wheel-cover and clambered around trying to find an appropriate nook, “Trying to sneak off without me?”

“Merlot,” he had said, panicking with the thought of her commentary more than the possiblity of mushing her (he tried not to enjoy the cartoonish image of her being pressed into the mud and then stuck, nearly flat, as the tractor rolled right on through), “I’m not going more than thirty feet, and it’s going to be boring.”

“Don’t mind,” she responded with a sweep of the hand. “Don’t see too much else happening around these parts.” This was, if anything, an understatement in a place that pretty much only had the turning of leaves going for it, thought Bastion. Still he liked it, and liked it quiet if possible without all the girls constantly crawling all over him. You going to put it over there? Why are you doing that? Is that enough room? Are you sure? Always with their questions, and what did he do but take care of them, really. What did he ever do besides that? And for that matter, how could he even be thinking about turning down the job offer? Yes, he would be leaving them for long periods of time, but he would also be providing for them, wouldn’t he? He’d be contributing financially, and they didn’t really need him there all the time, did they? Maybe they’d find ways to be happy if he weren’t always there, making things happen for them. Maybe they’d be better without his constant help. That doesn’t make sense, he told himself, with a sigh.

“Let’s get going then,” he said finally when Merlot tossed a dirt-clod at a tree directly behind them. Reversing the tractor slowly, he enjoyed putting his hand on the bucket lever. Not that he needed it yet. Wished he could have been digging a big hole. How much fun that would be, maybe he could find an excuse later to do that… like a pond for the family or something. With koi, or maybe just goldfish. He pushed the lever up and down a little, jiggling the tractor as it started its slow, relentless march across their yard. No reason to move it, but no reason to not move it, right? He wondered if he put the bucket all the way down against the ground and then kept pushing the lever, whether it would lift the tractor right up. If Merlot weren’t there, he might have tried it. He sighed again. He should take the job. It was so perfect, him and the water and the boat and the other guys. No mother and sisters and sisters. Quiet. Maybe he could finish stacking all the wood today and then they would be set for the winter, so it wouldn’t really matter if he went away. Plus, maybe Will would look in on them, make sure they were okay.

He just wished they were okay more frequently. But no, they were never okay, he had to admit to himself. His mom was probably clinical. Probable no doubt. Hadn’t they always known it? He and his sisters scrambling for the ends, jumping to the corners of the trailer back when they had one, always ready to move and then move again, hustle out of her way, hustle back when she called. Crawl in her lap and smell that even red smell of her skin, like pepper or something. And then the others, Swallow so bad she had to leave; without her, the tight constraint of Naomi’s shoulders, the sharp slap way she had of talking to the others. Like they had nothing in common anymore, not even the pleased smirk they had always shared. Lord knows they couldn’t have looked more differently than each other: Bastion couldn’t even have qualified as a looker if he began wearing paper bags with lookers painted on their surface, but Naomi nearly made people shine just to look at her… well, since she had grown up. So no, they hadn’t had much in common but hadn’t they always had that smile, they glint of humor sparking between them without even having to face each other? That at least, the sign of their twinship, but now it was like she was gone too except maybe her bitterness.

The tractor reached the pile of wood and so Bastion stopped and remembered to push the brake extra hard and pull the knob that locked it into place. He rubbed the bucket lever again, felt the hard black smoothness of it, resting in the center of his palm, and then lifted it gently with his index finger, felt the tractor jolt with the heaviness of its own parts. He felt a fondness for it, mentally thanked Will again for letting him use it for the weekend if he looked after Rodney. He’d give Rodney an extra treat this afternoon. Bastion looked over, but couldn’t see if the great beast was watching through the kitchen window, so turned his attention back to the levers. After positioning the bucket where he wanted it, he pulled the second level until it had flattened out—its opening almost directly facing the sky but slightly tilted towards the woodpile. The whole thing had become such a burden, he thought as he climbed slowly out of the tractor, hampered by his incredible bulk—his thick ankles nearly caught in between the bucket cogs and the wheel cover.

On the ground, he stood up straight, caught the crick in his back, and stretched. Despite his obesity, he was not only strong but also surprisingly flexible, surprisingly fit. He stood up taller and looked at the woodpile, which he was going to slowly transfer into the bucket and then cart over to the woodshed for stacking. Maybe this was all it was going to take to keep them warm. Maybe that was the first step, he thought; maybe then things would be okay. He started over to the pile and began tossing pieces into the bucket.

Up in the tractor cockpit, Merlot had lifted out of her corner and slid into his seat. She placed her hands on the wheel, and then one hand on the levers. “Hey, Bastion,” she asked, “Can I drive it over to the woodshed?”

Bastion pitched a few more pieces of wood, and then straightened to see her resting her arms and head on top of the wheel, looking down at him. She tilted her head to the side and thrust her lips out beseechingly. Bastion smiled, and bent back down to the wood.

“Not unless you climb on down and help me do the actual work,” he said, and waited to see if she would climb down. But she didn’t, and instead watched him from under her sweatshirt hood, no doubt sulking and mentally berating him. Bastion wondered again if it would always have to be him, and unconsciously doubled the pace of his wood tossing while thinking of the way the water splits into foaming halves when a fast escaping boat goes through it.

Academe

Just a beginning, but here's my sketchy start of something.

The guide walks backwards, the way they always used to do. Kate had read an article recently—where was it?—which mentioned that college campuses were doing away with this practice. Too many guides had been injured over the years, tripping backwards over a piece of uneven pavement by the library entrance or an exposed root on the path along the science building, drawing blood, concussions, loss of consciousness. Or was it that the imminent risk of such a fall had proven too great a distraction for the parents on the tour, already fearful and on edge about entrusting their own children to this campus full of unseen perils and walking hazards? This seems plausible enough—she notices the assembled parents warily watching their tour guide’s blithe backward walking, so young and so light footed, already free of her own parents influence. Were these parents fearful of the guide’s fall, or secretly willing it, the way people secretly hope that the worst will happen, to lend credence to their fears, the way Kate sometimes has to keep herself from flinging something vitally important (cell phone/briefcase/car keys/infant child) off the cliff when she hiked on steep trails to “get away” from it all? At any rate, the article reported, the parents were not paying sufficient attention to the merits of the Universities on display (or the colleges’ liability insurance rates were soaring) and so some Consortium or other decided to have their guides turn their backs to the audience from that moment on. And so came the end of an era. Or something like that. But the memo seems to have escaped the attention of the Admissions office at Brookshire College.

The campus is small in her dream, and the layout oddly cramped—Kate is surprised to find it bearing such a resemblance to both her windowless urban high school and the liberal arts college where she’d gone for graduate school. Her subconscious has cobbled together a strange assortment of cheaply made portable buildings arranged around red brick and ivy administrative buildings. Kate is the only one on the tour who has come on her own, no sullen kids hanging as far away as they can manage and still participate, no hovering parents embarrassing her with their shrill engagement, their endless questions about the food or the library holdings or the changing facilities in the new state-of-the-art sports center. She is a lone wolf, slinking through the tour…does anyone notice her? Not the parents who are too amped with anxiety to notice anything other than their own painfully vulnerable children. Not the children who are not able to actually perceive anyone over 35—to them Kate is relegated to terminal adult status: boring, unfashionable, and mercifully invisible. Like the parents however, she fears and hopes for the worst. She dreads running into Jonas here, but after all isn’t that why she has come? Why else would she be here in her dream, halfway across the country at the college where he teaches (according to Google), smiling a frozen polite smile while a blithe blonde coed enumerates the ways in which living on-campus has its benefits? Luckily, or unluckily, she has not seen him yet.

Not true: She sees him everywhere; he is every young male grad student with an untucked button-down shirt, a tweedy ill-fitting jacket with elbow patches, mis-matched socks, studiously tousled hair. He is hand-rolling a cigarette by the library; he is sitting in the commons reading Nabokov, Borges, Sebald; he is carefully demonstrating the only two chords he has taught himself on the guitar to a wide-eyed undergraduate and her slutty looking roommate. He is wondering which one of them he will sleep with first: virgin or whore? They are both sizing him up as well, making their own calculations as he closes his eyes for a particularly soulful strum. Kate wants to call his name, to see if he looks up, but she doesn’t want to be rude and interrupt the tour guide.

But if this is truly a dream, why is she so inhibited? Why not just cry out his name, why not just get it over with? For one thing, there are too many of him. It’s as though she is in a fun house campus, where hidden mirrors reflect back a multiplicity of Jonases. He could reject her in stereo! She would like to know how he has managed to stay so young, while she has aged in the 10 years since he left. No doubt he is older, paunchier, has grown a beard, has office hours. Has an office. Which building, she wonders?

The tour has gone on without her, and she must run to catch up.

House Tour

Again, I go first. Ha ha. Ugh. So I took the prompt and kind of followed it. The rumination doesn't necessarily happen during the guided tour, and isn't as expansive as it could be if I were not working under the constraint of not using a certain word...or maybe that wouldn't change anything. This character/concept is something that I have been messing around with since the summer and do want to get into better shape. So kudos to JK for the prompt choice:)

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The last time I ventured out, it was to meet my mother for a tour of one of the historic neighborhoods in the area. For $25 we were given access to the living rooms and gardens of the stately, set back from the road, houses that belong to people with more money than most everyone I used to know. When I was younger, anytime my mother and I were in the car together, she would take the long route home just so she could pass these estates. She would ask me which was my favorite, and I would always point to a Victorian house on a corner lot, painted lavender with sage trim around the railings and windows. There were planters on the steps, and rocking chairs on the wrap-around porch, and I imagined myself corseted, with my hair up in one of those elaborate buns of the era, sipping tea and waiting for suitors. Mom preferred a house a few blocks down, composed mainly of brick, with large stained glass windows in the front, and ivy growing up one side of the house.

The tour was led by a perky retiree who clearly enjoyed the power of having so many keys in her possession and smelled faintly of cinnamon toast. She referred to the owners of the different houses by their first names, and provided little anecdotes about how a room came to be painted a certain color, or the amount of money spent to remodel a kitchen. Mom and the others on the tour exclaimed at window dressings, upholstery, gas ranges and hardwood floors. I looked at framed family photographs and commissioned portraits, imagining the secrets behind these pristine presentations of home.

We did stop at my former fantasy house. I sat on the porch, watching the others admire shrubs or meander through the parlor room. I had a few quick flashes throughout the day, but extremely fragmentary ones. My best friend in third grade, Sally, remembered making pancakes in my kitchen, and how illicit it felt to be up before my parents. Billy thought about our trip to Greece, and the feel of my hands on his shoulders and my breasts against his chest as we floated, loosely entwined, in the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean. A girl I babysat once remembered my showing her what happened when you mixed baking powder and vinegar together. In a particularly jarring moment, as I was sitting on that house’s porch and she was inside with the rest of the group, Mom recalled our drives and my fondness for the house she was exploring.

These recollections were not overly disruptive to me. Sally hardly ever thinks of me, and when she does it’s always with a fondness I would reciprocate if I knew how. Billy can be a little more troubling. I have become accustomed to the way his flashes feel. It’s almost worse when he stumbles upon a time like Greece. When he relives the time I threw a shoe at his head, or called his brother a pompous jerk, it’s quite difficult not to then think about all the other uncharitable or insensitive actions I made during our relationship. Though it is hard to constantly face the worst of my character, I find it far more difficult to be reminded of my own former happiness. Mom also can have this effect on me, bringing to the fore the adjusted person I used to be. It breaks my heart that my meeting her for lunch at a Qdoba five years ago could, for her, be considered an example of ‘the good old days.’ She considers these relatively banal interactions precious, and there is nothing I can do to explain without giving her even more to worry about. I have attempted to fade from all my former friends’ lives in an effort to decrease the flashes (out of sight, out of mind) but I cannot break up with my mother. Each time we meet, I know I’ll see the experience again, at some point, from my mother’s perspective, and it will hurt. I will wince at her fear over the direction my life seems to have taken. Even when she has moved on to another topic, my day will be spent trying to shake off that residual worry she feels whenever she thinks of me.

Prompt the 2nd: "Valentine's Day Love Story"

(Just kidding)

Okay, since I've been trying to steer myself into writing on the longer work I've been hacking away at, my prompt uses the instruction "select a character from a piece you've been working on," but I would like to note that this could also be a character from a piece you want to revise, a character from a long-since finished piece, a character from a piece you've been planning to write, or perhaps your favorite celebrity. Any of those would be excellent choices as well...

The Prompt: Select a character from a piece you've been working on, and determine the abstract concept most important to this character (for instance: love, loyalty, revenge, kindness, cleverness, etc). Then, write a scene in which this character is thinking about this abstract concept, but without ever actually using that specific word (love, loyalty, revenge, kindness, cleverness, etc). In addition to thinking about this concept, your character should either be:

a) on a guided tour,
b) operating construction equipment for the first time, or
c) on a shopping spree with someone they do not like.

Whala!