Cover Your Mouth When You Blog

This Blog - Guaranteed 10% More Literary by 2008!

A writing instructor recently called me literary.

“From your word choice,” he said, “especially in this first paragraph, it’s obvious that you read a lot.”

Then, like that pretty, yet insecure friend who insists on detailing to you every schlub who blatantly hit on her in the cereal aisle, every suit who grinned at her on the train, and every yogi who inadvertently (inadvertent my ass, she says) grazed her boob while adjusting her shoulders in the Cobra position, I set out to convince myself that my instructor was right:

ME: God, this chili is toothsome!

COWORKER: Tooth? What? In the chili?

ME: No, dear friend, toothsome means delicious, pleasing to the palate.

COWORKER: God, now all I can think of is that woman who found a fingertip in her Wendy’s chili. I can’t eat. Thanks.

- - - - - -

SISTER (lamenting the failings of inner-city schools): And so half the kids in the eighth grade aren’t even at a fifth grade literacy level!

ME: That’s so sad, because being literary is really such a joy.

SISTER: You mean literate?

ME: Well, that too, of course. I mean first you have to be literate and then, perhaps one day a writing instructor will tell you that you are literary, which actually a writing instructor did tell me the other day. And it really is such a joy.

- - - - - -

ME: Hey Tony! So what’d you do this weekend?"

TONY (Barista at my regular coffee shop): Well, on Friday the wife and I saw The DaVinci Code.

ME: Was it good?

TONY: Yeah. I mean the book was better. Did you read it?

ME: No. Well, I mean I read the first two chapters and then just couldn’t continue. It was just so poorly written.

TONY: Yeah, I suppose it was. But the plot just hooked me, you know?

ME: I suppose. I just prefer more literary pieces, I guess.

TONY: Well, I was reading The Trial at the time, too, just for old times’ sake and because I felt like it related so much to all the shit going down at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo at the time, and I just needed kind of a fluffy piece to offset all the gloom.

ME: Uh huh.

TONY: You like Kafka?

ME: I’m sorry? No, just a green tea.

TONY: No. Kafka. The Trial?

ME: Oh, right. No, he’s a little too, what’d you say? . . . gloomy? . . . He’s a little too gloomy for me.

TONY: Yeah, seriously. So what’re you reading then? (motions toward the magazine peaking from the top of my purse)

ME: Oh, this? Elle.

TONY: Mm. Literary.

- - - - - -

As brightly as I recall the spray of thin wrinkles spreading from the corners of my mom’s eyes as she combed her fingers through my bangs and told me that my singing voice was absolutely good enough to try out for the solo at my high school’s annual Christmas pageant, I remember the warm light in the room and the crumb of bagel caught in the writing instructor’s patchy white and brown beard when he said that I was literary. What a lovely thing to believe, I’d thought, but it’s simply not true.

Coming of age in a town of 3,000 people had its perks. Set loose at age nine to bicycle through the familiar streets until sundown, slumber parties on the big trampoline in the front yard and an easy spot on the volleyball team, Student Council and the National Honors Society, concerns about danger or competition almost never applied. I grew up feeling safe and, for the most part, above average.

It wasn’t until college that I realized that my rural education had lacked certain elements. The girls in my dorm talked of their senior-year term papers on Emily Bronte and Jane Austen and their impact on early feminism. When classmates casually referenced Chekhov and Nabokov, I thought they were talking about Russian ballet. Yes, I’d read some classic literature – parts of Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf and excerpts from Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby in the English Comp I and II courses I’d taken for college credit senior year of high school. And I had a chance encounter with Catcher in the Rye while skimming the library shelves during a dull study period, finding intrigue in the book’s threadbare cover and taking it home, but it wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I learned this was an important book by an important author.

I took the final college English course required for my business degree senior year, reading Heart of Darkness and a few others in the travel literature genre that I don’t recall. I made it through Lolita and The Awakening one summer break when I wasn’t taking classes, but never found extra time for the Russians and the Frenchmen and the early feminists I’d missed out on in high school.

In the years since college, I’ve often regretted missing the opportunity to piss and moan at having the classics forced upon me as a teenager. The writing instructor was right – I do read a lot – but literary I’m not. At least not in the way I interpret the word. I fake my way through with some really great writers - David Sedaris, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates – but I’ve yet to crack open a Hemingway, Woolf or Dostoyevsky. To hope to write while ignoring literature that’s endured for decades and centuries is like an aspiring architect satisfied at never having seen the Colosseum close up, to be satisfied with a superficial, two-dimensional understanding, to never have immersed oneself in the center of it.

So I picked up a book called Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, who invites the reader to “sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters.” The idea’s that by reading great writing, you learn how to be a great writer. The last chapter of the book is titled “Books To Be Read Immediately.” I skipped to this chapter and found that of the 117 must-reads, I’ve read four. Seriously. I’ve read 3.4% of the recommended books.

My goal for 2007 is to finish 11 more books off this list, at which point I’ll have increased my literariness by over 10%! Any suggestions? The four I’ve already read are: The Corrections (Jonathon Franzen), The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien), Lolita (Nabokov) and Frannie and Zooey (Salinger).

Orthodontia and Other Life Goals

As a young girl growing up in Southeast Kansas, the one thing I dreamed of most was to one day work in a tall, shiny office building in which I would have a large wooden desk of my own, behind which I would always be found attired in flattering suit jackets and heels that clicked across the lobby's marble floor as I rushed to important meetings. Aside from making it Mary-Tyler-Moore-hat-flinging style in the big city, the other aspiration that tickled my budding mind was not the hope for a sparkling wedding, handsome husband, green lawn or children to dress up in darling little booties. More than any of these common dreams of young girls, I dreamt of orthodontia. Oh, how I longed for braces. Thanks to my father, whose straight teeth I inherited, I was told at the tender age of 11 that this dream would never be. "The alignment of your teeth is near perfect," Dr. Cleverly had said, leaning over me in a paper mask, "You're a lucky girl." Lucky my ass, Dr. Dreamcrusher, I'd fumed internally, glaring at the Garfield poster affixed to the ceiling above the dentist's chair.

My older sister had been fortunate enough to get our mother's teeth, a zig-zag of lower incisors and even a molar growing behind another molar on the upper right side. She not only got braces, but later retainers to wear at night and at one point in between, a contraption called a bionater, which may have gone the way of the lobotomy since the late 1980s. I observed her oral hygiene rituals with teeth-gnashing envy. Globs of wax mashed against sharp bracket edges and a cleansing process of picking, brushing and rinsing with special liquids and instruments garnered from monthly dentist visits. When she showed up one day with a blue retainer with silver glitter embedded in the plastic palate, I almost lost it.

I played dress up in my sister's retainer whenever I got a chance, flashing metal through a coy smile at myself in the bathroom mirror, "Oh what? My retainer? Oh yes, I just got it. Thank you," until our mother caught me one day and said that if I broke that $800 piece of plastic and wire, she'd have to sell my Huffy to replace it. But so unyielding was my desire to have uncomfortable hunks of metal bound to my teeth that I took to stretching out paper clips and wearing them across the upper and lower arches of my mouth. When the sharp end of my makeshift corrective device punctured my gums during a sprint down the stairs to catch the ringing telephone one Saturday evening, I shoved a ball of cotton between my cheek and the wound, tossed the paper clips into the bathroom trash can and acquiesced. Some dreams are not meant to be.

I mentioned to a coworker recently, massaging my temples as our heels clicked across the marble floor of the lobby of our office building, that I'd been waking up with headaches in the last few months. "Does your jaw hurt?" she asked in the elevator.

"It does actually."

"You're probably grinding at night."

"Grinding?"

"Your teeth."

"Really?"

"It's stress-related. My husband's a grinder."

I shared the symptoms with my dentist a few days later and he said "grinder" as if were as common a nighttime behavior as heavy breathing. "Are you under a lot of stress at work?" he asked.

Other than the occasional snap of memory that straightens my spine as I tinker my way around another Excel chart at work, and sends the sudden and panicked realization pulsing into my cerebellum that, as a girl, when I dreamt of a large, wooden desk in a shiny office building, I was sitting behind it typing out a story - that in my dream, I was a writer? "No, not really."

"Are you under any other kind of stress?"

Other than the creeping recognition that the things I didn't dream of as a girl - the wedding, the husband, the healthy lawn and children - might be just as difficult to accomplish? "No, not really."

"Well, we're going to fit you for a night guard. It's a plastic device that you'll wear over your top teeth at night to keep you from grinding them against your bottom teeth. My assistant'll be in to fit you in a minute."

A plastic device that I'll wear over my teeth at night? A twinge of excitement. I guess some dreams just take their sweet time in coming.

"Eventually they all move on."

Over a two-week period in the sixth grade, three-fourths of the only two pair of identical twins in my small junior high school went away.

Brit and Drew – the girl twins – moved with their parents and older sister to a town in Oklahoma called Broken Arrow and, a week before they left, threw a party around their backyard, in-ground pool where white cupcakes with white frosting were served, each topped with a single colored gumball.

One half of the other set of twins – the boys – left exactly a week later. Sean, of Sean and Dean, died on the floorboard of his family’s minivan when it skidded into oncoming traffic on a rainy drive home from shopping in Wichita.

I remember, about four days after Sean’s funeral, walking into the kitchen where my mother stood rinsing a colander of green grapes in the sink, clutching my arms around her waist and pressing myself to her side. She turned, the faucet still running, and draped her arms over my back, letting them sway gently back and forth like windshield wipers. I was small for my age and we still fit together like mother and child; it would be almost four years before I would sprout breasts and hips and outgrow her. It felt strange then still, to burrow my wet face into a place in her sternum familiar from childhood and sob. I think that I said, “I feel like everyone’s leaving,” or if I didn’t, I remember feeling it. Not sorrow or longing; after all, I hadn’t known Brit, Drew or Sean all that well. It was a small town and so everyone knew everyone, and the girls fell into the wide circle of my slumber party circuit, but I didn’t miss them in any real way, or Sean who had only moved to our town at the beginning of the school year.  Still, I felt abandoned somehow - left out, as if Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and wherever it was that Sean had gone were essentially the same place. Away.

This feeling resurfaced and surprised me yesterday, flipping through the Chicago Reader on the train to work. “This Party’s Over” was the headline under Chicago Antisocial, a weekly column written by Liz Armstrong, a (by all observations) shallow, immature, self-obsessed woman charged with documenting her weekly escapades in the world of Chicago’s hipsters and scenesters. I read the column infrequently, finding even a two-dimensional, black and white recounting of a night in the life of the woman who once proclaimed herself “the party girl of Chicago” to be too exhausting to endure on a weekly basis. Turns out the “Party’s Over” because Ms. Armstrong is moving to Las Vegas. Well, who cares, right? Sayonara? But, no, my heart sank as I read the only paragraph written by Armstrong that’s ever struck within a block of a chord:

“Chicago’s a transient city, which makes it exciting—there’s always something or someone new. But eventually everyone you know leaves. People from small towns come to try out living in a city; people from larger cities come for a break. Eventually they all move on.”

The train stalled over the Chicago River and I thought of my friend Angie, living once five blocks from me in Boystown, living now on the Upper West Side of NYC, and of the two sets of married friends who’d defected to Colorado in the past three years, in search of space and natural beauty. I remembered startling awake from a nap on the couch one bright weekend afternoon in the stark white apartment on Aldine Ave., the words “everyone’s leaving” on my lips, days after learning that my ex-boyfriend was moving to LA with the girl he’d started dating two weeks after we broke up. <

At work I cyber-stalked that ex-boyfriend and found his band’s website and a photo of him, shaved head and a silver band around his left ring finger. I Googled other former flames to no avail, cursing all the common-named men from my past; it’s impossible to sift through all the hits associated with a name like Steve Evans or Frank Lewis. Eventually I MyStalked a guy I’d dated for just three weeks in 2003 and unfortunately slept with in his apartment above Bangkok Restaurant on Halsted just before he got back together with his ex-girlfriend. I found him single, living in New York City and having written a very funny post about school kids with rolling backpacks on his MySpace blog. I wanted to email him and tell him I’d enjoyed the post. I wanted him not to forget his apartment on Halsted Street that smelled of cigarettes and peanut sauce. I wanted him not to forget me.

J mentioned once that if “eventually everything fell apart here,” he’d probably move to Birmingham, since he’d been spending so much time there anyway.

“If everything fell apart?” I’d asked.

“Yeah, with work or whatever,” he’d said.

“Well, what about me?” I’d asked.

“For you, I’d stay.”

I startled awake in bed last night, a tingle of panic in my chest, my jaw sore from clenching, the words “don’t leave” caught in the back of my throat. It took a split second for my conscious mind to catch up and I rolled to his side of the bed, knowing that it was empty because I’d asked him to leave, knowing that my life will not be how I imagined it would be, knowing that J might one day be a Google search and I’ll be thankful for the unusual last name that I once imagined hyphenated behind mine. I gripped the fat pillow he used to sleep on and wanted to stop the rotation of the earth. I wanted to clutch my arms around the sturdiest part of him and feel his hands on my back and his whiskers on my cheek, the two of us fitting together how we used to before I think I outgrew him.