Projects

Yay for writing concentration-ness! So what this really means for me is that instead of doing two analytical senior projects for the English major, I only do one (in the fall) and and then I get to do a creative project (in the spring). Which is excellent. So the following is the piece I submitted for my application and it's (tentatively) the opening story to the short linked collection I want to write for my project (think Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid, but not in chronological order). I've been thinking about this story since early 2008 so I'm really looking forward to getting it out of my head. So, here it is (sorry the formatting is weird!): No Travelers Return.

In July, my sisters and I fly home to bury our father.

We are not happy he is dying; but then, it’s not sadness either.

The morning he will leave us, the house runs the way it did when we were young. We dart in and out of the hall, wait for a turn with the blow dryer, shout; we look for stockings without runs, earrings that match necklaces, then decide against them both. We zip dresses, worry about the heat, our shoes, the road. We put on eyeliner, the four of us packed shoulder to shoulder in front of the bathroom mirror.

Downstairs our husbands are occupying the children. Samantha’s husband is on breakfast duty, scrambling eggs and pulling trays of French toast sticks out of the oven. Leslie’s husband is redressing the baby in the living room for the third time since six am. Eva’s husband hasn’t been her husband for three months and has decided not to come. My husband Simon is the new uncle and the children don’t know him very well. Samantha’s twins are eleven and inquisitive and throw question after question at him, asking him about his job at the Treasury, like why we don’t live in a big house if his job is to make money, or why he just doesn’t tell his boss to make more and fix everything that is wrong. He sits with them at the table and does his best to answer. He starts to speak, then stops, asks if they know anything about inflation.

“Like balloons?” one says.

He laughs and tells them to ask again when they have taken algebra.

We sit at the table, together for the first time in such a long time, and do not speak of why we are here. We laugh at our fingers sticky with syrup, momentarily forgetting the day.

Years ago when it was just beginning I asked: What’s the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist?

And Dr. Nguyen said: Psychiatrists and psychologists both help people understand their feelings, but a psychiatrist is someone who went to medical school and can prescribe medicine.

So what are you?

I’m a psychologist.

So you didn’t go to medical school?

No.

Then why is there a Dr. in front of your name?

Because I have a Ph.D.

What kind of doctor are you?

I’m a doctor of psychology.

But you didn’t go to medical school?

No, I went to graduate school.

So you’re not a real doctor then?

I am a real doctor. Just not a medical doctor.

Because you didn’t go to medical school.

Because I didn’t go to medical school.

I thought and didn’t say.

I thought and did say: I’m not crazy.

Did someone say you were?

No.

What made you say that?

I don’t know. Isn’t that why I’m here?

Why do you think you’re here?

I knew and didn’t say.

Coming to see me doesn’t mean you’re crazy, Annabel. Talking to someone can help us better understand how we feel and why we feel that way.

I just wanted you to know.

You wanted me to know what?

That I’m not crazy.

I didn’t think you were.

And I said: OK.

And she said: OK.

Two cars pull into the driveway as we are clearing the dishes—a blue compact with an Enterprise sticker on the license and a green Chevy pickup with a polish job that throws the sunlight right back through the trees. We step onto the porch.

Linda and Jimmy are from Sharonville two towns over, but Celeste in the rental has flown in from Arizona and brought her son Michael with her. Michael is fifteen and keeps his head ducked and his hands in his pockets except when he is fiddling with his Blue Devils baseball cap. He’s the starting pitcher for his summer team and is missing the playoffs for this, but he doesn’t say a word. Linda pulls a grocery bag from floor of the pickup and balances it on her hip. While we are gone today she and Celeste will make scalloped potatoes, devilled eggs, our mother’s fried chicken. But the food is purely strategic. We will not be hungry tomorrow, but it will give us something to do with our hands.

They do not ask how we are, but slip their arms silently around our shoulders, guide us back into the house.

Upstairs, Simon sits on the bed of my childhood room, already sweating through his dress shirt, fanning himself with the latest edition of The Economist. I balance myself on his knee and reach for the knot of his tie, slipping my finger between the silk and the cotton, pulling gently until it gives.

“You can take this off,” I tell him, snaking the length of fabric through his collar.

He puts his hand on my back, looks up at me.

“I’m sure,” I tell him for the thousandth time.

“I can wait in the car,” he says.

I half-smile, “It’s 110 degrees out.”

I run my finger along the slick sweat his hairline.

“You Yankees weren’t made for this.”

He says, “Bel, nobody was made for this.”

I press my forehead to his and thank him for being here.

Dr. Nguyen said: So your mother tells me that you’re very good in math and science.

I like them.

What do you like about them?

That you can’t argue.

How so?

It doesn’t matter what you think or what anyone else thinks. The answer is the answer and either you’re wrong or you’re right.

Leslie calls from downstairs. I kiss Simon softly and stand up.

“Anything,” he says. “I’ll be right there.”

Michael and the twins are playing a game of Chutes and Ladders in the dining room, and everyone else has congregated in the kitchen.

And Samantha is saying: “…and make sure they’re in bed before ten or else they’ll never…”

And Eva is saying: “…ten minutes, and we’re out …”

And Leslie’s husband is murmuring to the baby, and the baby is gurgling with his whole fist in his mouth, and the sunlight’s coming through the lace curtains throwing a mad dance of patterns across the group us. Jimmy asks if he can say a prayer before we leave and we answer, Yes, Please, Of course, and bow our heads because it is nice to have a believer among us.

The trip is just under two hours and I drive it by muscle memory. The four of us sit like statues inside the car, but outside, the whole world is moving; blurring greens and whites and browns, rising, falling, and rolling as we hurtle along the black-ribbon road. We roll the windows down and listen to the sound of tractors as they comb over the soft earth, kicking up clouds of dirt. Every few miles there is the din of a low flying plane as it rumbles over the fields, leaving a cloud of pesticide in its wake.

I don’t blame my sisters for leaving the way they did, and taking our mother’s maiden name with them. Leslie took acting classes in Manhattan. Sam got a voice coach in LA and taught herself to pick up her R’s, drop the junebugs and tall cottons. The coach made her put a rubber band around her wrist and snap it every time she slipped up. She laughed about it after, how for the first two months her skin was tomato-red and raw.

We are mostly quiet inside the car, the three of them mimicking my silence. They have not been back in ten years, and they defer to me although I am the youngest, the one who had him least. They defer to me out of guilt. They defer to me because I am the one who stayed.

Dr Nguyen said: So what are you working on in science?

I said: We did plate tectonics last week. Now we’re learning about tsunami.

Tsunamis? Did you—

It’s tsunami.

I’m sorry?

The word tsunami, it’s both singular and plural. Like fish, or sheep.

I didn’t know that.

And tsunami aren’t tidal waves. They actually have nothing to do with lunar tides. It’s a common misconception.

Is it?

Yes. Tsunami are really caused by large vertical shifts in water, like those triggered by a large impact or an underwater landslide or the collapse of a volcano into the ocean.

So how do I know if a tsunami is coming?

Well, usually there’s a warning system.

She said: But what if there isn’t a warning system?

Parchman Farm is 18,000 acres that might go unnoticed if not for the aluminum signs or the groups of men in canary-yellow shirts throwing their hoes at the earth, sweating like God is watching. We pass the rows of mustard greens and sweet corn, pecans and butter beans, tomatoes and field peas. It’s 18,000 acres that are almost quaint. We turn right into the complex, pulling in behind the line of cars idling under the metal arch.

I said: Sometimes, just before a big tsunami comes, all the water near the shore goes out. And sometimes, people go to the beach to look at the fish and the coral that have been left behind because they don’t know what’s about to happen. And by the time they see the water coming back in, it’s too late and they run but they can’t get away and they drown.

Dr. Nguyen said: What do you mean by that Annabel?

I said: You want me to talk about my dad.

When I was eleven my father beat the sheriff’s skull in with a hammer until it wasn’t skull shaped anymore and then shot his pregnant wife right between the eyes. He came home that night with blood on his shirt and smelling like the scrap yard. I was the youngest by six years, and by the time the trial started Leslie, Sam, and Eva had graduated and left. And I don’t blame them—I don’t blame them at all.

Today we will touch our father for the first and last time in fourteen years, hold the closest we have ever come to a ghost. In the parking lot of the Mississippi State Penitentiary there are people who have been waiting for this day as long as we have. And they’re screaming as we get out of the car. Someone has brought a model gallows and hung a sign with our father’s name from the noose. Others have brought Sterno cans and small skillets to fry bacon; some of it they eat gleefully, some of it they hurl at us as we pass. They shove photographs of the other man, his wife, their daughters, in our faces, scream, This is who you should be crying for. They scream as if we do not know what he has done.