Orange and maroon are on the move, like a river burbling down the sidewalk, like burgundy water roiling with golden Koi.
From my perch on a grassy hill, I see a sea of wine and oranges, a teeming tide of tee-shirts that streams towards the stadium. I hear the laughter and drunken hoots of Hokie fans. Children run with pom poms rustling. They laugh and lick ice cream and rattle plastic plumes while Dad slips a flask into his sock, or a fake camera with a liquor cavity into the diaper bag. On the way to the game, they – parents and children and college kids alike – are full of excited energy.
As the crowd thins – kickoff is near and the fans have funneled into the stadium like fish over rapids – I hear the hum and the sputter of a biplane in the crisp autumn air. Its hum heightens to a whine as it approaches, then recedes to a buzz as the plane banks towards the stadium. It pulls a banner, flapping like clear tape behind it, advertising pizza or insurance or the used care lot down the road.
The sidewalk is empty now, clean even, and I hear a gathering roar, carried across a mile of blue sky from Lane Stadium. The sound builds – rooooaaAAARRRRR – as football fans stomp and cheer for kickoff. A yellow butterfly floats over a bush near my knee.
After, when the tide recedes from the stadium, it will leave debris, just like the ocean. It will leave behind peanut shells and empty cups, abandoned pom poms and maroon and orange hair bows. If the Hokies won, the party will continue all night, a crash of waves under moonlight.
I wrote this at the beginning of football season in Blacksburg, VA, home of the Virginia Tech Hokies, in response to a writing workshop prompt “orange and maroon on the move.”
Little girls in pajama pants and dripping swim caps, the insides of their arms marked with Sharpie charts – Event | Heat | Lane – play UNO and eat nachos on the floor. They giggle and dance and grab each other’s wrists to read the numbers when the loudspeaker announces “Event 57, Girls 10 and under 200 yard Freestyle, Heat 1.” They’re looking out for each other, making sure nobody misses her event, taking care that they get back over to the pool in time to line up for their races. I missed this yesterday, the first day of the meet. I’m glad I came today.
—
“Don’t be discouraged about her place,” the text from my husband read. “She’s one of only 2-3 7 year olds out of 30-50 swimmers in each event, going up against 10 year olds.” I read this from the sidelines of our son’s soccer field on Saturday, when we had to divide and conquer to get our kids to their sporting events: our son to a soccer festival 2 hours south in Martinsville, VA and our daughter 2 hours in the opposite direction to her very first USA Swimming sanctioned meet, the season opener, in Lynchburg.
I wrote back, “It might be hard on her now, but wow, by the time she’s 10…”
—
The YMCA gymnasium is a chaos of camp chairs, coolers, blankets, swim caps, towels. I scan the staging area and follow a trail of kid-sized wet footprints, spatters of water flung out in front of the big toe, to a huge semicircle of about 20 maroon and orange Virginia Tech camp (tailgating) chairs. I walk over to the closest parent, smile, and say, “I’m guessing this is the H2Okie Aquatics team?” I set up my chair and stick out my hand, “I’m Andrea. This is our first meet.”
His eyes light up and he says, “Ours too.”
—
My phone vibrated in my back pocket. “Coach just used AB to show the girls how to do breast in warmups :-)” I shoved the phone back into my jeans and smiled into the rain, clapping and hollering for our son out on the field.
—
My new dad friend tells me about the body marking. “We’ve been writing their events on their arms so they don’t lose track of where they need to be.” I borrow a green Sharpie from a seasoned 8 year old – she’s got an assortment of purple, black, red, and green fine points in her monogrammed swim bag – and write our daughter’s numbers on her skin. “You’re in the first even today – are you excited?” She showed me a mouthful of teeth and shook her head up and down.
—
I introduced myself to a new-to-me mom on the soccer team. She has four kids. “How do you get them to all their separate sports?!” I asked.
She smiled big. “You make friends.” I told her about later in the year, when our son has a tournament in Richmond, our daughter has a swim meet in Blacksburg, and my husband will be out of town at a conference. “I’d be happy to help out,” she said. “We can get your son to Richmond.”
My phone buzzed again. “On our way home,” my husband wrote. “You guys staying dry? We just got soaked.”
“Yes,” I tapped out, my flip-flopped feet covered in wet grass clippings. “Chrissy brought a tent, thank goodness. She left but I’m bringing the tent home. We need to get it back to her Tuesday at practice.” I watched the field from our dry spot under the team canopy. I stood next to my new friend.
—
After our daughter’s first two events, we have an hour and a half to kill in the gymnasium. The semicircle of VT chairs is in a continual state of transition as kids leave to swim an event, and others return with towels draped over their shoulders like robes, leaving trails of wet footprints. Goggles are propped on swim-capped heads, and these 8, 9, and 10 year old swimmers rub their eyes with terrycloth corners as they replay the races with their parents and teammates.
A quilt of blankets and towels covers the center of our team circle. There’s a My Little Pony salon on the green and blue tartan flannel (with a Barbie in one of the chairs), muffin crumbs and UNO cards on the cream cotton weave, and a unicorn Pillow Pet on the maroon fleece. Monogrammed Speedo backpacks loaded with Gatorade bottles lay abandoned, some upright, some on their sides, like book bags dumped in the hallway when kids burst through the door at the end of the school day.
Our daughter plays cards with a new friend and eats a banana. Her friend pulls out a nachos Lunchables and holds it out to our daughter, “You want some? We can share it.” They still wear their swim caps, though our daughter has donned fuschia sweatpants and a matching hoodie, and they laugh and munch among the swim meet detritus – half eaten apples, empty Gu packets, still-wet goggles, and sodden towels slumped at their knees. Janitors mop the trails of wet footprints that lead into the gym, and then stop at the edge of the chair/blanket/wet towel chaos. They don’t lean on their mops and shake their heads, but I imagine they want to.
The dad next to me checks his watch. “Girls, you want to go warm up again? You’ve been sitting out for a long time.”
I make eyes at our daughter – “You want to?”
“YEAH!” She strips off her hoodie and sweat pants before I even stand up from my chair.
—
“AB is in the warmup pool and she makes me so happy,” I texted my husband on Sunday. “She’s just grinning and swimming.” She hung on the wall after each lap, giggling with her teammates. “She loves it.”
—
On the pool deck, all the parents carry our kids’ towels and our highlighted heat sheets. We check and recheck for lane assignments, make sure the children are where they need to be, cheer for each other’s swimmers. I see lots of H2Okie Aquatics shirts. I want one. I thought about how sweet the soccer parents were, offering to take our son to Richmond, leaving their tent so other parents could stay dry. I thought about the swim parents who helped us with body marking, whose kids shared toys, blankets, and snacks, and the excitement we shared with our children at their first meet. I didn’t play rec sports when I was a kid. I wasn’t on the volleyball squad in high school. I didn’t swim or play soccer or basketball. I like this feeling of camaraderie. I like being part of something bigger.
I considered reading a short story like going out to dinner and only ordering an appetizer. Want a real meal? Eat a goddamn novel. – Jacob Tomsky
I came to the short story late. It wasn’t til this year, 2013, at the age of 38, that I finally began to appreciate this form.
I don’t remember exactly when it began. Three ingredients fell into a pot over a period of months – Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and subsequent suggestions that I read “The Lottery,” my quest to read Southern women – and a delicate broth began to bubble. It was thin at first, but as it perked and popped, as it reduced and thickened, its flavor deepened, became more complex, more surprising, and more pleasurable than I thought a humble soup could be.
Like Tomsky, quoted above, I never considered short stories to be – what? Rich? Deep? Memorable? No. None of those alone, and all of them at at once.
Satisfying. That’s what it was. I didn’t think stories would fill me up. I didn’t think they’d satiate. When I read, I want to get lost in a story. I want setting, I want fully fledged characters, I want depth and complexity. I don’t want chop. I don’t want quick. I want a good thing to continue. I want to gorge.
When I first came across A Moveable Feast, I did not realize it was a book of short stories (or memoirs – I think Hemingway didn’t want to get sued, so he claimed “This book is fiction.”) I was disappointed it wasn’t a novel. I began anyway, and within minutes I was underlining passages, finishing a narrative then leafing back to it’s beginning. That bit was only four pages, and look what he did! The amount of story, character, setting, punch that Hemingway accomplished in each piece astonished me. I ate story after story, in bed with my yellow pencil, appreciating short form fiction for the first time, impressed by how smart an author has to be to achieve such brevity.
My reaction was similar when I read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” I had written about The Haunting of Hill House, and so many reading friends responded with, Have you read “The Lottery?”, that I finally resigned myself to finding the book. My friend Amy said, No, it’s not a book. It’s a short story. Here’s a link. I read it in a matter of minutes, while onions caramelized in a skillet on the stove. In that short amount of time I gasped in wonder at the story’s brilliance, at how much there was to chew on. How much there was to hold on the tongue. How much there was to savor.
And then. My quest to read Southern women. Who comes to mind when you think of Southern women writers? Flannery O’Connor. A sister Savannah native, whom Amy chided me for never reading. “Hello, Andrea. She went to our alma mater.” And what did O’Connor write? You guessed it. Short stories. Twisted, powerful, Southern Gothic 10-page pieces with flesh and blood characters and as deep an immersion in the South as I’ve experienced in any full length novel.
More tastings followed – a wallop of a story from my critique buddy, short fiction from my dad – and it was at this point, when I was in this blinking, vulnerable, maybe short stories are awesome state that I came across Jacob Tomsky’s “So You Hate Short Stories” manifesto on Book Riot, in which he tells the (short story) of the origins of his Short Story Thursday project in which he emails a classic short piece out each week. I was practically cheering by the end of his essay. As soon as I read the final sentence, I sent an email to shutyourlazymouthandread@shortstorythursdays.com and said, “I just read your piece on Book Riot, and I want short stories on Thursday please. Thank you!”
So far in my 38 years, I’ve read very few brief fiction pieces. I barely know where to begin. Other than O’Connor and Hemingway, my experience with short stories is limited, and I am in a feed-me state: feed me your favorites. My ears perk when my favorite podcasters discuss a must-read compilation of short stories (Alice Munroe), and now, every Thursday, I eagerly await Tomsky’s carefully curated, hilariously introduced, always-a-fun-surprise classic short story in my inbox.
Short stories are becoming my go-to when I want to graze, or snack, or when I am in that limbo between novels, when I’m hungover from the last one or need to cleanse my palate for the next one. But even more than that, even more than snacking or grazing, I am realizing that though a novel may provide a fill-you-up meat and potatoes type meal, sometimes fine dining is composed of tastings – of exquisite soups served in demitasse cups, a single bite of melt-on-your-tongue lamb, a plate of fruits and cheese. And sometimes, the most fun meals are spent lingering late at night, filling up at leisure tapas-style – tortilla Española, Serrano ham, grilled Spanish sausages – sating your palate, your need for entertainment, your hunger, small plate after succulent small plate.
If you think you’d be interested in signing up for Short Story Thursdays (SST), please read Jacob Tomsky’s piece on Book Riot. It will give you a feel for what the introductory email is like for each story – hilarious (to me) and with lots of swearing. You can also follow SST on Facebook and on Twitter @SSTexecutives.
In the antique store on the corner of Franklin and Main, among cut glass candy dishes and earthenware moonshine jugs, were rolling pins. Wooden, dinged, well-used. In each room they were stashed in groups of three or four, standing on end in a tin bucket, or displayed like vintage wines on an iron rack. Their handles were worn smooth from a grandmother’s floured grip rolling pie crusts, rolling cookies, pounding nuts to crack them open or crumble them to dust. The pins had history, were golden with the oils and warmth of caring hands.
Or of drudging ones. How many of these were wielded as weapons? How many mothers chased a drunken husband with one, or a naughty child, Mother’s hair wild, curls coming loose from her braid in the hot kitchen where soup bubbled and the steam made her hair sproing?
Looking at these pins, inanimate now, tucked under a harvest table in an antique shop, I saw love and work. I saw fleshy palms and red cheeks, flour poofs and golden pastry. I saw Christmas Eve with shiny copper cookie cutters shaped like stars and candy canes. I saw meat pies and bubbles through slits in the crust. I saw buttery dough with rough edges as strong feminine forearms, muscled like Popeye’s on spinach, rolled, pressed, and turned the smooth sheet. A bosom heaved, and there may have been grunting if the dough was too tough. The pin would clank on the counter, the handles would rattle. Children would sneak corners and pinch edges off, and nibble and giggle while Mom raised the wooden pin, “Don’t you touch that crust!” And she’d try to look mean and menacing, but it was Christmas and she’d break down and start giggling too.
How many stories were in these wooden pins? Were they all from Virginia? Maybe some traveled here from Appalachian Ohio, or West Virginia. Maybe even from Minnesota, like me. Would I feel their history if I touched them? If I bought one and used it – that honey one there, with handles so polished with use they fairly gleamed – would my pies and cookies be enchanted? The pins looked smooth to touch, and they were comforting in their roundness. I could cup my hand around a cylinder and run it down the pin’s length. Would it be cool or warm in this antique shop? Would it tell me a story?
A resolution that came out of my writing workshop was to take an artist’s day out every week. Last week I visited Antiques on Main in Christiansburg, VA where the rolling pins caught my eye and inspired this piece.
To those who have found Nora hard to like, Messud points out that she would seem extremely likable if you met her, “and that’s the point. It costs her a great deal to be a likable character … underneath that she feels she has had to hide, up to this point, her real thoughts, her real dreams, her real desires, because they would be in some way unseemly or perhaps offputting to people.” – Claire Messud interviewed by Alex Clark in The Guardian
Two weeks ago I would have told you that characters are critical to me enjoying a book, a story, a creative non fiction piece. And by good characters I would have meant likeable characters. I would have told you, I’m not going to get attached, I’m not going to get into their stories, I’m not going to keep reading if the characters are jerks. If I don’t like them, why would I care what happens to them?
Like my friend, for whom setting is critical – she wants to spend time in a place she wants to be – I read to spend time with people I want to hang out with. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call (Lonesome Dove) are probably my best friends in literature, and despite the fact that the story always ends the same way, no matter how many times I read it and hope that it won’t, I read and reread Lonesome Dove because I like to be with Gus and Call. With Gone With the Wind, I reread it over and over again because even though Scarlett O’Hara drives me bananas, I’ll spend all day and night with Rhett Butler, thank you very much.
But after three recent books I read, I’m reconsidering my position on characters. Until I read them, I would have argued that even if there are ugly or annoying characters in a book, their detestableness provides delicious tension when balanced against the protagonist (think Disney movies) – will my guy triumph? Will the nasty character amend his ways? But now, I’m not so sure.
The first of the game changers was The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. Messud’s novel has sent the literary world into a tizzy because the main character is, according to everyone else, unlikable. I’ll concede that she’s not sweet-natured, but unlikable? That’s a stretch for me. Either way, I’m not sure why this has caused such a fuss because personally, a) I found Nora to be quite relatable, and if not someone I’d want to be best friends with, I at least understood her, and b) she was WAY more likeable than either of the – protagonists? – in Gillian Flynn’s insanely popular Gone Girl. (Perhaps it is because Nora is an unlikable woman?) I question the term protagonist for Flynn’s characters because protagonist suggests the one you’re rooting for, and honestly, even though Amy and Nick are the lead characters, one of whom should technically be considered the protagonist, I wasn’t rooting for either of them. They are anti-heroes, antagonists, and they both made me snarl (and also laugh) as only a well-crafted villain can. Was there such a fuss about their unlikability as there was with Messud’s character Nora? I don’t know.
The third book that kept me turning pages, even though the characters repulsed me, was The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. Within the first five or ten pages, I didn’t trust or like the narrator nor his best friend, Norton, around whom the story revolves. The more I read, the more disgusted I was by both of them – their arrogance, their superiority – and yet I kept turning pages, all the way to the end, when I was so revolted that I took the book back to the library within minutes of finishing it. I wanted it out of my house.
I’m not generally a rubber-necker. I don’t enjoy train wrecks, neither the literal nor the figurative kind, and I don’t gape at gore – I turn away before I see it. And yet… With all three of these books, contrary to what I would have told you two weeks ago, I devoured them despite the unlikability, despite the train wreck stories, of the characters. I wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with or get close to any of these people, yet I did still care what happened to them. In fact, of all the books I’ve read this year, these were the three that I devoured, that I put writing and chores and sleep aside for. Why? I can’t figure it out. Perhaps it is because of these characters’ realness. These authors took human traits that all of us are prone to – anger (The Woman Upstairs), self aggrandizement (Gone Girl), entitlement (The People in the Trees) – and rather than push them down, they brought them to the surface. These authors showed us what goes on inside an unsympathetic character’s mind, granting us understanding (Gone Girl, The People in the Trees) and sometimes even compassion (The Woman Upstairs). They also showed what happens to a person when these traits become dominant, the types of sorry lives they lead when they don’t keep their meanness in check. They showed what could happen to us if we hide too deep and too long, or at the other end of the spectrum, if we think only of ourselves and let loose all our faults.
Maybe I was wrong, then, about needing characters to be my best friend if I am to enjoy a book. My gorging on these novels is testament to that. None of them even had good guys to balance the antagonistic “protagonists” against, and yet I ate them up. I do know, though, that in order for me to want to read it again, for me to willingly spend time in a story over and over, I’m going to need to love a novel’s players. I’ll hang out with ugly people once and listen to their tales, but if I’ve checked them out from the library, I can pretty much guarantee that they’ll be going right back, without me scooping up a copy for my own shelves. Because for me to want to buy a character’s story and keep it in our home, in our company, the characters not only have to be likable, they have to be my friends.
What about you? How do characters affect your enjoyment of a book, or your likelihood of re-reading it?
I highly recommend The Woman Upstairs. The work is exquisitely crafted, and as I said, Nora wasn’t particularly unlikable to me. Her intelligence and articulation might merit a re-read, even if I don’t want us to be besties. For my immediate reactions to the three books mentioned, here are my reviews on Goodreads, written as soon as I finished reading: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (curiously, the book I liked least was also the most thought-provoking).
As a stay-at-home-mom whose life consists of my husband, my children, these walls, washing dishes… most of my stimulus, my interaction, my life experience that would be of any interest to the outside world are the funny things my kids say, the conversations we have about sex and bad words and God. My material comes from my husband and my children, because really, who wants to read about dusting picture frames and planning grocery trips? What do I write about as a stay-at-home-mom who won’t write about her husband and kids?
When I read this back to the workshop, the instructor’s mouth dropped open. She shook her head and I think she may have wagged a finger at me. “Oh no no no. Change of plans. We’re not doing the next exercise until we get something out of the way first. Andrea, you do a 10-minute free write about yourself without husband or children. Your prompt: ‘I’m not married and I don’t have kids.’”
I glared at her. “I don’t like this plan, Lesley.”
She smiled sweetly. “Good.”
I’m traveling. I’m in Ireland, in the green hills and pubs and stone walls. I’m at Stonehenge. Then I’m in Italy, eating pizza, sitting in the sun, riding on a bus.
But I’d be lonely. As I sat on a green hill on campus today, on my belly in the grass, with no husband, no children, just the sun and the blue sky and the buzz of insects and my miniature prompt book, I saw a little girl ride by on her purple sparkled bicycle. Her helmet was white and pink, and she looked to be maybe 7, and the sight of her made my heart ache for my daughter. It had only been four hours, and I missed her.
But I’m to write about what it would mean to me to be a woman not defined by my husband or my kids, as that is how I defined myself in the previous piece. “What can I write about if not my husband and kids?” My God, I’m going to have another identity crisis.
Needless to say, Lesley’s plan unmoored me. When I moved from the workplace into the home to raise our kids it was critical to me to maintain my identity, to not be defined solely by my roles as wife and mother, to not be lost, wandering in circles and wondering “Who am I?” when our children move away. I wasn’t one of these women I read about in Judith Warner’s piece, The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In, powerful executives who gave up success and high pay and a bright future to raise families, but that doesn’t make my identity any less important. My husband and I both wanted our children to see that I am not just Mom, a one-dimensional woman whose sole purpose is to serve them, and their school, and our family. I am Andrea, too.
So why, then, all the belittling self-talk? Why, when faced with the prohibition on writing about my family, did I feel so less than – less than the high-powered execs, less than my husband, less than my kids, as if their life experiences are so much more valuable than mine, their stories more worthy of telling? Why did I feel I have no stories to offer if I can’t offer theirs? Perhaps it is the memory of the neighbor who said, “Is that all you do?” when I told her I was a stay-at-home-mom. Or the glazed eyes of a grad student at a party after she asked, “What do you do?” (those dreaded four words) and I said, “I stay home with our kids,” and she sipped her drink through her straw and scanned the room for someone more interesting to talk to.
Or maybe it was analogous to when someone says, “Don’t think of black,” and of course all you can think of is black. When I thought “don’t write about husband or kids,” I zeroed in on their significance in my life. I don’t know who I would be if not for them now, I wrote.
But as Lesley instructed at the beginning of the exercise, I kept the pen moving. “Don’t lift your pen from the paper. Do not pause. Do not think. Just write.”
But if I am to follow my son’s advice, if I am to write what I like, I am a book lover. I love words. I love the way words can capture life, can articulate feeling, can bring us together and show us – yes! There is someone else like me! I get you, you get me, I am not alone.
I continued, I like place. I like the feel of fresh air on my skin, the smell that distinguishes a person’s home, the scent of a cliff over the Atlantic in Maine, the silk of my daughter’s hair spread over her pink pillow. I began to feel grounded. Less floaty. I like people. I like the refined drawl of my aristocratic Southern Grandma. I like boatsmen who wave. I like bakers who see their craft as a means to share celebrations. Felt my Andrea-self flowing down my arm and through the ink. When I am alone, and not doing chores, I choose to read, or I choose to write. Or I walk in nature. I watch a butter-white butterfly soar up and down over violet blooms, flapping its wings excitedly in sunlight, “ohmigod ohymigod, I found it guys! I found the purple flowers!”
When the timer dinged, I wasn’t satisfied that I’d gotten anywhere. That I’d have anything to write about, or any stories to tell. Lesley instructed us to read through our piece, pick three words or phrases, and for each of those we would do a three-minute word association exercise. Okay. Easy enough. I picked “what I like,” “life experience,” and “stay-at-home-mom.” She started the timer.
I wrote, What I like: thunderstorms, islands, sand, sea, salt, sky, white puffy clouds. As I wrote, I thought, huh. I’ve written pieces about all of these things. Baking bread, color, literature, trees, rocks, thinking, smells, coffee, a good pen. Good pieces, I thought. I wrote good pieces about some of these, and I could write better pieces about more. God, the universe, pastries.
We moved to our second phrase. Life experiences: Riding a bicycle from North Carolina to Washington, DC, SCUBA diving, toting carboys of water through the woods, happy hour in Annapolis. Those were good times. Riding in boats, making marsh shoes, fiddler crabs. I’ve written about those too. Maybe I don’t depend on the kids for material as much as I thought.Attending Quaker meeting, natural childbirth, living on an island. Damn, there’s a lot here.
I started feeling good, started thinking about whether my best pieces really are about the kids and realized, nope. They are not. My best pieces have been about my own experiences, sometimes from the perspective of mother, which is a large part (but not all) of who I am, and sometimes not. And so I came to my final phrase. I swallowed and began.
Stay-at-home-mom: Mother, nurturer, loving, kind, compassionate, baker, home maker, peace maker, yeller, boring, bland, creator of life. Supportive, alone, lucky, temporary, mother, mother, love, love, tender, caring, family, trying really hard to do the best thing for our kids, opportunity to write, good at my job, funny, different from what folks expect, full of ideas, educated, intelligent, warm, big-hearted. Not boring. Interesting.
The timer dinged and I stared at my list. My identity there on the page. Not boring. Interesting. Human. A woman who who has plenty of her own stories to tell.
This is part 2 of a two-part series. For the first installment, please see The right to be forgotten.
This post was inspired by Simone Gorrindo’s A Hidden Writing Life on Vela magazine’s blog and by the Dostoyevsky artwork at the top by Ryan at Design Different.
I highly recommend The Woman Upstairs. The work is exquisitely crafted, and as I said, Nora wasn’t particularly unlikable to me. Her intelligence and articulation might merit a re-read, even if I don’t want us to be besties. For my immediate reactions to the three books mentioned, here are my reviews on Goodreads, written as soon as I finished reading: 
Butterfly Mind 