coconut, part 2

Does anyone ever feel like they really fit in? Maybe so, for a moment or two, but as for me, I mostly feel just a bit out of place. This is the second installment of ‘Coconut’, a story about wanting to belong, but cherishing those shirt-tail parts of one’s self that come untucked at the most inopportune moments, exposing our true hearts.

We were halfway through our unit on Asia and Mrs. Gracie wrote ‘India’ on the board in her newly shaky script. So I sunk in my seat, waiting for what always happens to happen. Whenever they bring up India in school, everybody looks over at me. Me in my t-shirts and jeans from Regency Mall, right where their clothes come from. Me who like plain cheese pizza and hanging out with my friends. They stare as if waiting for the Real-Indian-Me to burst through like a song and dance in a Bollywood movie. As if I will start bobbing my head like Abu on The Simpsons or chanting with my eyes rolled way back. Even though I have lived here since I was a baby; I’ve known most of these kids since grade school, for Christ’s sake.

 

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girlfriend

I discovered odd candy wrappings and a crust of a PB& J in William’s lunchbox, things I hadn’t packed for him. So I asked him about it. He looked at me sheepishly before answering:

–Maggie gave them to me
–Who’s Maggie?
–My girlfriend.
–So she gave you some of her lunch…did you give her anything?
–My salami.
–But you’re always saying you don’t like girls…
–Well, I like Maggie.
–Why is she your girlfriend? How did you know?
–I looked at her; she looked at me.

Here are a few new talented girlfriends from my writer’s retreat:

Smart, salacious sex and travel writer Jenny block who writes columns for Huff Post and Fox News. I’m looking forward to reading her memoir, ‘Open.’

Vivacious, clever, Vivian Lawry, Author of the Chesapeake Bay Mystery, Dark Harbor.

And our teacher, Hollins Professor, Cathy Hankla, with her many books, recent winner of the Boatwright Prize for Poetry, and to whom I am thankful for her generosity and guidance.

Photo by Billy
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coconut, part 1

The first installment of ‘Coconut’, one of my favorite stories from ‘The One You Remember.’ This short was a finalist for the Jane’s Story Annual award in 2/2009. It begins:

I was a nice girl before Principal Jackson ushered Satya into our English class. ‘Her family just moved her from India,’ he told our teacher, loud enough for us to hear. When he said ‘India’ he brought his hands together and squeezed and predictably, half the class looked over at me.

 

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twin oaks and other summer excursions

As an detour from my regular fiction, this summer I’ve drafted a screenplay. I jumped on board to my husband Billy’s project because I wanted to work with him, and I was interested to see something I wrote possibly exist more fully in the world: actors speaking words I have written, and places I’ve imagined more or less come to life. And if all else fails, at least the chance to collaborate with other people on the process. Mostly, as a writer, I work alone. Mostly my stories sit silently in drawers, in piles red with workshop notes, waiting.

A screen play by its nature is a different beast from fiction. It is all structure: setting and action and dialogue positioned just so. The past, the internal world of the characters are (should be) shown only through what they do in a scene. This seems true in a way, too, like when you sit beside a stranger on a train, you only can guess at their past, their beliefs, by what they do and say, and the common space you share.

Our screen play takes place in an imagined place called ‘Christiania.’ The real Christiania exists in Copenhagen, a massive urban commune, big as city block big. In 2005, a brutal conflict with a drug gang led to a mayhem, infiltration, and several members shot. Ours in a smaller story, closer to our home, and our first place to look is at some of the communes (okay, alternative communities, intentional communities) here in Virginia. What does it mean to live in intentionally, and how does that go day to day? How can that difference lend to an interesting story?

Here is a bit of an opening scene:

EXT. DOWNTOWN – AFTERNOON

A young man, bright eyed, scraggly-faced, stands on a corner in a small-town downtown. A few people hurry by him against the backdrop of run-down storefronts. He extends flyers out toward them from the stack he holds in the crook of his arm. A jar for donations sits at his feet.

ISAIAH

Here you go, man—sir… It’s gorgeous out there…heaven on earth, truly….

An older man takes a flyer, nodding politely, but then sets it on the trashcan after passing.

ISAIAH

Excuse me, ma’am,… Two? Sure… take as many as you want…

A woman, busy with a toddler and a girl, takes two flyers, but then she gives them immediately to her children. The girl-child studies the paper. It appears homemade; there are flowers pressed into it. She rubs it against her check.

Two Goth teen-aged girls stop to talk to the young man. They huddle close, barraging him with questions, not pausing for his reply:

GOTH-GIRL#1

What’s it really like up there?

GOTH-GIRL#2

What do you DO all daylong?

GOTH-GIRL#1

Whatever you want, I’ll bet.

Billy and I took a look at Twin Oaks, a bucolic, well organized intentional community outside of Charlottesville. They hold Saturday tours, for a donation of a few dollars, a guide will walk you through all the buildings–laundry, cheese making, hammocks—along with glimpses of what life might be like there.

Photos by Billy

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wearily at the walmart

The signs boasted ‘unbeatable’ but from where I stood, things looked broken. From the waxy de-laminating floors to the pairs of plastic shoes hanging—off-gassing and strung together like fish.

I wandered the aisles, filling my basket with 5.99, 2.39, 1.29, weaving through mothers struggling behind strollers and old people wearing worn sneakers and furrowed brows.

The construction out front was marked by cryptic posters: ‘ Wait for the WOW!’ they read, but I for one, was not dying of anticipation. I hurried by a stack of cinder-blocks, a story high, teetering near the doors.

As for you Walmart, I used to fear your belligerent ‘Beware of Falling Prices! and you ceaseless expansion, but today I just felt sorry for any malice I may have wished on you and yours. As if you are, in some small way, a symbol of the promise of America; your decline a view to what we might become.

Read more about Walmart here.
Or for fun, consider this: Big box stores, like our lives, are cluttered with objects. My friend Hope just launched a site about the stories behind objects called both Life with Objects. Read it, write for it. Enjoy!

Photos by Billy

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the episode, part 1

I have a secret love for TV judge shows: Judge Judy, The Judy, The People’s Court. I know its wrong: all those people airing their dirty laundry for a few dollars and my entertainment, but I can’t help myself. And those judges with their TV smiles, highlighting the chaos then making order from it, like a perfect short story. Here is my story, The Episode, which starts with 13 year old, defendant Jarrod.

Jarrod knows that his mother is big, but on the episode she is chunky, hefty, obese. The camera adds pounds to her massive breasts and bulging stomach. In pans to better show her thighs: pink rolls of flesh of flesh beneath a frayed jean mini-skirt.

 

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three women, three books

I take it as a very good sign that three women have given me three books already this summer.

One, a recommendation, and the other two: paperbacks placed in my hands with trust and pleas of safe return, as if these broken-spine books were something really special—and they are.

The set is stacked in a pyramid on my nightstand, arranged big to small. I’m reading them all together, flipping in and out a chapter or section at a time. It’s like diving into three distinct worlds, three different writers’, three unique women.

Mary Jane generously handed over Tinkers, by Paul Harding, a recent small press Pulitzer Prize winner which reads like poetry and air-conditioning—thanks to those New England winters.

And also, from KP, Drop City by T.C. Boyle—clever commune research for the screenplay I’m supposed to be drafting.

And finally, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, which reads like an erudite Veronica Mars episode but with annotations. I would not have even picked this book up—it has the word ‘Physics’ in the title—but for librarian goddess Heather’s encouragement.

One book I’d like to lend to you is The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrows, which is gentle and brutal at once.
Take care of it. Pass it on.
Wonder what it says about me,
About you.
Enjoy.

What books would you like to pass on this summer?

Photo ( at top of post) by Billy

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some other girl, final

She showed me the bruises on Monday in the locker room. They were mostly on the soft part of her upper arms, dark shadows shaped like giant thumbs. I tried to look away, back at her face, but the thin skin around her hairline had broken out in tiny red bumps. her gym clothes were rumpled and dirty. She pressed deeply into her bruises with pale fingers.

 

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some other girl, part 3

Momma, Amber said…You told me, you promised me, it would be different once we moved here.

It’s not so easy, Mrs. C said roughly. she pulled off that visor, her red hair matted in a ring beneath it. Its not so easy, girlfriend, she repeated, and I felt like she meant this for me too—like I was included, even though I no longer wanted to be.

do what you want, she said. But its not so easy. You’ll see.

 

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