the Imaginary and the Imaginal

“To our joy or to our misery, the contingencies of reality have a great influence on what we write,” says Natalia Ginzburg in her book “It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself,” in the chapter in which she discusses her life and her writing in the wake of personal disaster.

It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I describe my current writing experience, at this time in my life, I wish to make a few observations about the impact that a disaster, a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable.” The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, “Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day.”

Indeed, after many years of living in the extreme and violent reality of a political, military and religious conflict, I can report, sadly, that Kafka’s mouse was right: the world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow, increasingly diminished, with every day that goes by. And I can also tell you about the void that is growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent and chaotic situation within which he lives. The situation that dictates his life to him in each and every aspect.

And this void never remains empty. It is filled rapidly — with apathy, with cynicism and, more than anything else, with despair: the despair that fuels distorted situations, allowing them to persist on and on, in some cases even for generations. Despair of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it. And the despair that is deeper still — despair of what this distorted situation exposes, finally, in each and every one of us.

And I feel the heavy toll that I, and the people I know and see around me, pay for this ongoing state of war. The shrinking of the “surface area” of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there. The limiting of one’s ability and willingness to identify, even a little, with the pain of others; the suspension of moral judgment. The despair most of us experience of possibly understanding our own true thoughts in a state of affairs that is so terrifying and deceptive and complex, both morally and practically. Hence, you become convinced, I might be better off not thinking and opt not to know perhaps I’m better off leaving the task of thinking and doing and establishing moral norms in the hands of those who might “know better.”

Most of all, I’m better off not feeling too much — at least until this shall pass. And if it doesn’t, at least I relieved my suffering somewhat, I developed a useful numbness, I protected myself as best I could with the help of a bit of indifference, a bit of sublimation, a bit of intended blindness and large doses of self-anesthetization.

In other words: Because of the perpetual — and all-too-real — fear of being hurt, or of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of “mere” humiliation, each and every one of us, the conflict’s citizens, its prisoners, trim down our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diapason, ever enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up suffocating us.

Kafka’s mouse is right: when the predator is closing in on you, the world does indeed become increasingly narrow. So does the language that describes it. From my experience I can say that the language with which the citizens of a sustained conflict describe their predicament becomes progressively shallower the longer the conflict endures. Language gradually becomes a sequence of clichés and slogans. This begins with the language created by the institutions that manage the conflict directly — the army, the police, the different government ministries; it quickly filters down to the mass media that are reporting about the conflict, germinating an even more cunning language that aims to tell its target audience the story easiest for digestion; and this process ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language of the conflict’s citizens, even if they deny it.
Actually, this process is all too understandable: after all, the natural riches of human language, and their ability to touch on the finest and most delicate nuances and strings of existence, can hurt deeply in such circumstances, because they remind us of the bountiful reality of which we are being robbed, of its true complexity, of its subtleties. And the more this state of affairs goes on, and as the language used to describe this state of affairs grows shallower, public discourse dwindles further. What remain are the fixed and banal mutual accusations among enemies, or among political adversaries within the same country. What remain are the clichés we use for describing our enemy and ourselves; the clichés that are, ultimately, a collection of superstitions and crude generalizations, in which we capture ourselves and entrap our enemies. The world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow.

My thoughts relate not only to the conflict in the Middle East. Across the world today, billions of people face a “predicament” of one type or other, in which personal existence and values, liberty and identity are under threat, to some extent. Almost all of us have a “predicament” of our own, a curse of our own. We all feel — or can intuit — how our special “predicament” can rapidly turn into a trap that would take away our freedom, the sense of home our country provides, our private language, our free will.

In this reality we authors and poets write. In Israel and Palestine, Chechnya and Sudan, in New York and in Congo. Sometimes, during my workday, after several hours’ writing, I lift my head up and think — right now, at this very moment, another writer whom I don’t even know sits, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or in Belfast, just like me, practicing this peculiar, Don-Quixote-like craft of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and estrangement, indifference and diminution. Here, I have a distant ally who doesn’t even know me, but together we weave this intangible cobweb, which nevertheless has tremendous power, a world-changing and world-creating power, the power of making the dumb speak and the power of tikkun, or correction, in the deep sense it has in kabbalah.

As for me, in recent years, in the fiction that I wrote, I almost intentionally turned my back on the immediate, fiery reality of my country, the reality of the latest news bulletin. I had written books about this reality before, and in articles and essays and interviews, I never stopped writing about it, and never stopped trying to understand it. I participated in dozens of protests, in international peace initiatives. I met my neighbors — some of whom were my enemies — at every opportunity that I deemed to offer a chance for dialogue. And yet, out of a conscious decision, and almost out of protest, I did not write about these disaster zones in my literature.

Why? Because I wanted to write about other things, equally important, which do not enjoy people’s complete attentiveness as the nearly eternal war thunders.

I wrote about the furious jealousy of a man for his wife, about homeless children on the streets of Jerusalem, about a man and a woman who establish a private, hermetic language of their own within a delusional bubble of love. I wrote about the solitude of Samson, the biblical hero, and about the intricate relations between women and their mothers, and, in general, between parents and their children.

About four years ago, when my second-oldest son, Uri, was to join the army, I could no longer follow my recent ways. A sense of urgency and alarm washed over me, leaving me restless. I then began writing a novel that treats directly the bleak reality in which I live. A novel that depicts how external violence and the cruelty of the general political and military reality penetrate the tender and vulnerable tissue of a single family, ultimately tearing it asunder.

“As soon as one writes,” Natalia Ginzburg says, “one miraculously ignores the current circumstances of one’s life, yet our happiness or misery leads us to write in a certain way. When we are happy, our imagination is more dominant. When miserable, the power of our memory takes over.”

It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can at this point, and from the location where I sit.

I write. In wake of the death of my son Uri last summer in the war between Israel and Lebanon, the awareness of what happened has sunk into every cell of mine. The power of memory is indeed enormous and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing quality to it. Nevertheless, the act of writing itself at this time creates for me a type of “space,” a mental territory that I’ve never experienced before, where death is not only the absolute and one-dimensional negation of life.

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

I write. I feel the wealth of possibilities inherent in any human situation. I sense my ability to choose between them. The sweetness of liberty, which I believed that I had already lost. I indulge in the richness of true, personal, intimate language. I recall the delight of natural, full breathing when I manage to escape the claustrophobia of slogan and cliché. Suddenly I begin to breathe with both lungs.

I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.

I write. I relieve myself of one of the dubious and distinctive capacities created by the state of war in which I live — the capacity to be an enemy and an enemy only. I do my best not to shield myself from the just claims and sufferings of my enemy. Nor from the tragedy and entanglement of his own life. Nor from his errors or crimes or from the knowledge of what I myself am doing to him. Nor, finally, from the surprising similarities I find between him and me.

All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy — this inhumane choice to “be victim or aggressor,” without having any third, more humane alternative. When I write, I can be a human being whose parts have natural and vital passages between them; a human who is able to feel close to his enemies’ sufferings and to acknowledge his just claims without relinquishing a grain of his own identity.

Sometimes when I write, I can recall what we all felt in Israel, for one singular moment, when the airplane of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat landed in Tel Aviv 30 years ago, after decades of war between the two nations: then, all of a sudden, we discovered how heavy is the load we carry all our lives — the load of enmity and fear and suspicion. The load of permanent guard duty, the heavy burden of being an enemy, at all times.

And what a delight it was, to remove for one moment the mighty armor of suspicion, hate and stereotype. It was a delight that was almost terrifying — to stand naked, pure almost, and witness a human face emerge from the one-dimensional vision with which we observed each other for years.

I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny — arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate — I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom — maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions.

And I write also about that which cannot be brought back. And about that which is inconsolable. Then, too, in a manner I still find inexplicable, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me in a way that would leave me paralyzed. Many times every day, as I sit at my desk, I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with his bare hands, and yet I do not die. I cannot grasp how this miracle works. Maybe once I finish writing this novel, I will try to understand. Not now. It is too early.

And I write the life of my land, Israel. The land that is tortured, frantic, drugged by an overdose of history, excessive emotions that cannot be contained by any human capacity, extreme events and tragedies, enormous anxiety and paralyzing sobriety, too much memory, failed hopes and the circumstances of a fate unique among all nations: an existence that sometimes appears to be a story of mythical proportions, a story that is “larger than life” to the point that something seems to have gone wrong with the relation it bears to life itself. A country that has become tired of the possibility of ever leading the standard, normal life of a country among countries, a nation among nations.

We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation. Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms. We treat, voluntarily, the harshest, ugliest and also rawest materials of the soul. Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists.

And yet, and this is the great mystery and the alchemy of our actions: In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write. Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the “official narrative” of our country, nor of fate itself.

We write. The world is not closing in on us. How fortunate we are. The world is not growing increasingly narrow.

David Grossman is the author most recently of “Her Body Knows,” a collection of two novellas. This essay is adapted from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, which he delivered at PEN’s World Voices Festival on April 29, 2007. It was translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf.

NY Times Magazine, May 13 2007

Here’s the revised version :) feel free to critique it.

Peek-a-boo

“Joy-lyn!” the voice screeched, high-pitched with a Midwestern twang. “Joylyn, I’m warning you, get down here now or I’ll be up there and slap you upside the head!”

Joylyn groaned and scowled at her reflection in the mirror, hazel eyes narrowing into slits, cherry-flavored lips puckering into a frown. Walking to the door, she turned, gave the phone on her bed on last stare, willing it to ring. But no –Justin had been out all night with the guys, getting high and trashing people’s yards, and wouldn’t wake for a few more hours. When he did wake up, there was no guarantee that it’d be in place with an accessible –or working –telephone. The realization did nothing to help her gloom, and she trudged as heavily as a slender 14 year-old can trudge, meeting her mother at the foot of the stairs.

“Where have you been? What have you been doin up there? I’ve been calling for you for an hour…” like the rattling hum of the antique AC generator on the side of the house, Ellen Roy’s scolding was no less aggravating for its constant presence. No matter how hard Joylyn, her two older sisters, and her four younger siblings tried, the nagging could not be tuned out. Joylyn walked into the kitchen, where her one-and-a-half year old brother Tim sat on the sticky yellow linoleum floor, eating from a pile of Cheerios someone had poured into a plastic bowl for his breakfast. Anna and Steven sat at the kitchen table, littered with newspaper ads, a naked Barbie with hacked- off hair, and a couple of unmatched socks from the last time laundry had been done. The 7 and 8 year olds were bickering about the cereal box toy, tugging at the box and whining. The box tipped, and Fruity Pebbles spilled out of the open end, much to the delight of Timmy, who stuck out his chubby, moist little hand and grabbed a few of the flakes, cramming them into his mouth and grinning a two-toothed smile at the sugary taste.

“…Anna! Stop that! You’re wasting food. Now get down and clean up that mess,” Ellen momentarily shifted focus from one daughter to the other. “and none of that blubbering, I don’t want to see it,” she sighed, as Anna’s chin began to wobble, her round eyes becoming glassy as they filled with tears. Joylyn walked to the fridge, sidestepping Tim and the cereal, and reached into the freezer for a popsicle. Always on one diet or another, popsicles were Joylyn’s most recent low-calorie meal replacement. “I’m still talking to you, young lady,” their mother continued. “I’m driving to Chicago tomorrow to take care of some things and I need you to watch the kids. Your older sisters have to go to work, so you need to be here all day, I might stop by Aunt Lois’s at night. Just keep them on our street and make sure they don’t kill each other. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, mom,” Joylyn sucked on the tangy green ice. “Why do you have to go, anyway?”

“Now don’t start bothering me with questions, I just need to try to straighten things out with the bank and the house, to keep a roof over ya’lls heads. Now go take Laurel –”

“Yeah, can’t Laurel help? She never does anything. And I need to get my stuff for school, we’re starting next week and I don’t have any –”

“Just listen to me and let me finish, will you? I’m telling you, you take your sister and go buy what you need from the pharmacy, there’s a coupon on the table and some cash in my wallet. Laurel needs some stuff too. And pick up a couple rolls of toilet paper and some Ovaltine.”

“’kay.”

“and no buying makeup! You already dress like you’re asking for it as it is.”

“Mom….” Joylyn rolled her mascara-lashed eyes.

“now don’t start, just get down to the store and back here without dawdling, I need you back here to help clean up this place before Granma comes on Thursday.”

“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” Joylyn acquiesced before she found herself committed to any other chores. “Laurel! Lau-rel!” she yelled, but hearing an eerie echo of her mother’s voice in her own, switched tactics and walked past the table to the back entrance, pushing the screen door and letting it slam shut with squeaky vengeance. The backyard was a tiny plot of land. Deep myrtle-green shadows cast by the neighbors’ willow trees swung lazily over fences and yards, nearly synchronized with the thump-thump of a child’s see-saw a few houses down. The fence that had once been a deep red, and more recently painted white, was peeling in streaks, as though a person had scraped his bloody nails up and down the unfinished wood, leaving red trails in the pasty splinters of cheap pine planks. Hand-me-down plastic toys, bought used at yard sales, littered the sparse grass, and a round little grill, a Christmas present to Ellen’s truckdriver boyfriend last year, stood on the tiny brick patio. Last month Steven had thrown a baseball that dented the shiny black cover, an incident that had him teary and clutching his fluttering stomach as his hid in his room for two hours, but no one noticed- not the missing, miserable boy, nor the dented grill, and it would be months still before his mother’s boyfriend would see it and wonder where it had come from.

Joylyn bit down on the popsicle stick, a woody taste filling her mouth, then tossed it on the ground where it hit a crumpled can with a clank. Gingerly picking her way across the yard, she approached her sister lounging in the gray plastic chairs set up in the sunny corner of the yard. Her summer reading book ignored on the ground, as it had been for the past two months, Laurel was in the midst of an attempt to achieve a tan, in an ongoing struggle against her milky complexion.

“Laurel?” Joylyn asked, with a sudden and incomprehensible urge to shake the girl stretched out before her. Laurel opened one eye. “Get your shoes, we have to go to the store to get our school stuff, mom said.” Laurel closed the eye, yawned, and slowly sat up. “Fine, I’m coming.” Relieved she wouldn’t have to put up with a fight, Joylyn relaxed. “Okay, I’ll meet you inside, let me get the money,” she called over her shoulder as she strode back across the lawn.

***

Joylyn ran up the stairs two at a time, bursting into her room and slamming the door behind her. Throwing herself onto her bed, she grabbed the receiver of her ringing phone and gasped a breathless “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Justin, is Joylyn there?” With six females in the house, Justin always played it safe.

“Justin!” her voice cracked into her first smile of the day. “What’s up?”

“I’ve got some good news….” He paused for emphasis. “What? Tell me!” she played along. Justin laughed. “Well, my parents are leaving for Wisconsin Dells early tomorrow morning…soo I guess that means we have the boat and the house to ourselves.” Joylyn could almost see his right eye wink. She gasped- did he mean…? “So, baby, how does a little fishing…and…you know, sound?” Justin’s voice had melted into the soft tone he normally reserved for when they were sitting alone at the movie theater together. He did mean it. Her heart fluttered in rosy anticipation –this was the Justin she loved. “Um, yeah! I mean, I’d love to come over. What time?” she hoped she didn’t sound too eager. She needed to be a little more coy. “Should I bring some bait?” she purred. Justin laughed again. “Bring whatever you want, as long as you come. Come early and we might get a trout or two.” They talked a few minutes longer, until Justin’s mother called him for supper. Joylyn hung up the phone, wiping her sweaty palm on her cutoff jeans, a studied herself in her mirror with nervous carefulness, then flung herself back onto her unmade bed, dreamily contemplating tomorrow. She would wear a turquoise tank top and khaki capris…or her pink sundress, yes, it was so cute and girly, and showed off her legs. Did she need to shave? She rubbed one bare calf against the other. Nah, no need. Then suddenly, she bolted upright as she remembered what she had to do tomorrow. Crap!

***

Ellen grabbed the steaming tray of tater tots and slammed it on the table. “You what?” she asked, tucking a stray tendril of brown hair behind her ear as she rummaged through a drawer for a spatula.

Joylyn sighed. She knew it was no use, but she plugged on. “I was just wondering, if, maybe, you could make Laurel babysit instead of me? Because, school’s starting soon and I have all this reading–”

“Tater tots again?” Laurel drifted into the kitchen and wrinkled her nose. “Mom, I’m gonna get so fat if you keep feeding us this stuff.”

“Laurel!” Joylyn and her mother’s voices resonated with the same annoyance.

“Sorry, sorry…I’ll just send you the bill when I need a new wardrobe,” Laurel muttered resignedly, selecting a chunk of the seasoned, greasy potatoes between her thumb and index finger and dropping it into her mouth as she sauntered out of the room.

Anna and Steven clamored in from the backyard, grimy and shoving each other. Seeing the food on the table, they immediately sat down and helped themselves with their fingers. “Kids, please,” Ellen’s voice was quieter, more exhausted. She handed Anna the spatula and grabbed Timmy, toddling around in an orange-juice stained undershirt, and buckled him into his booster seat. With a fork, she smashed tater tots into a mush so as not to require adult supervision, and let the baby feed himself.

“So-” Joylyn began again. “Maybe you could just talk to her and convince her to take care of the kids? ‘Cause I really, really…”

“Joy-” Her mother began. Steven screamed. Ellen turned to see a gleefully guilty Anna snickering over her meal. “Kids! Stop that right. now.” her voice had taken on a dangerous edge. The phone rang. “Joy, you wash the dishes when they’re done- Hello?”

Joylyn glared at her mother as she picked up the receiver. “I hate you, I hate you” she hissed between her teeth as she turned to face the sink full of dirty dishes. She could feel her frustration building up, her forehead hot and pulsing with bitter thoughts. It wasn’t fair, I wasn’t the one who decided to have all these kids anyway, why should I have to take care of them? Elise and Tory got it so easy, all they had to do was work, well no that wasn’t entirely fair, working the register at Caputo’s wasn’t exactly fun, but at least Elise got to be with different people and got to choose her shifts, and Tory loved her job, working at the preschool, which she probably for the rest of her life. That brat Laurel, though- Joylyn bit her lip and scrubbed the pan harder with the wad of steel wool. It was time Laurel learned to take care of more than just vain little self. If Mom wasn’t going to make her grow up, why then I’ll just have to do it for her. There was no good reason why Laurel couldn’t watch the kids tomorrow. When I was her age, I had to, all of the time. And I deserve the break, I’ve been cooped up here all summer. If only I could have gone to the beach, like everyone else. Joylyn closed her eyes and envisioned the warm sun on her head and shoulders, walking on a sandy beach, holding hands with Justin, laughing and squinting in the sun, the waves lapping at the shore….a wave that felt too real to be good splashed on her foot, and Joylyn opened her eyes and looked down.

“Sorry!” Steven grinned up at her. He showed her the rattling stack of plates in his hands, an empty plastic cup rolling on its side on top. Its leftover contents, Joylyn ascertained, were now on her foot. She scowled, but managed to keep calm.

“’s’okay Stevie, just leave them on the counter,” she said as she bent to wipe the milk, was it? Or apple juice? off her bare foot. I hope it’s juice, she thought, milk stinks when its warm, juice only gets sticky, which is also gross, but at least it doesn’t make you want to puke when you catch a whiff of it. Kids! When I grow up, I’m going to have one kid, maybe two, but definitely not more. And we’ll live in one of the old mansions up on Elm Street, the ones that look like gingerbread houses with fancy wooden trim painted in pink and yellow and blue. You have to be rich to buy one of those houses, but by then I’ll be married to a man in a suit, like the dad in Leave it to Beaver, and have a job of my own, too. A real job, not a paid-by-the-hour job like what Elise and Tory and sometimes Mom had. Mr. Krug last year had said I had a real talent for history, but who knows what kind of job you can get if you study that in college. No, but first I need to make sure I can get into college, get out of this place.

Joylyn finished the last plate and crammed it in the full drying rack. Selecting a dryer one, she sat down at the table and scooped the last of the tater tots onto her plate. Timmy offered Joylyn his drooling smile, then kicked his feet against the table. “Down! Down!” he shouted. Still on the phone, Ellen gestured to Joylyn to quiet him.

“Okay, okay baby,” Joylyn unsnapped his seat belt and lifted him by his armpits to the floor. “There you go,” she said, and turned back to her dinner, as her curly-haired brother unsteadily raced from the room, his bare feet smacking against the floor. Timmy had learned to run before he learned to walk, and still preferred the speedier mode of self-transportation. With his chuckles and blonde curls that bounced as he half-ran, half-waddled around the front yard, he was the beloved Gerber-baby of the neighborhood. Joylyn watched him toddle down the hallway and almost smiled, but caught sight of her mother, still talking on the phone, and the feelings of frustration returned.

“Uh huh, uh huh,” Her mother was saying. “Yeah, I understand. I’m trying –Yes, tomorrow. I see.” She was pacing the kitchen floor and wrapping her finger in and around the phone cord. “Okay, thank you. Alright, good night.” She hung up the phone, her fingers drumming an absentminded beat on the handle, and let out a shaky sigh.

“Mom, please!” Joylyn knew she was whining but didn’t care. This was how all her siblings got attention, anyhow. “I’ve been trying to ask you something for hours and you keeping shoving me aside.”

“Hm?” Ellen turned and looked at her teenage daughter.

“See!” Joylyn was triumphant in her bitterness. “You’re still not paying attention to me. Well, guess what, I’m not going to babysit tomorrow. I don’t care what you say. I have –”

“Okay, young lady, stop that right there. I happen to have a little more on my mind than you realize. You will babysit tomorrow, and you don’t have a choice, and you will listen to me, because I am in charge here.” Her mother snapped. “I really don’t need this from you right now. I’m going to sleep, I’ll see you in the morning.” Her quick steps thudded down the hall and up the stairs.

Joylyn sat, alone and smarting, at the kitchen table. Outside, cicadas and peeper frogs offered up a late-summer orchestral hymn, and the girl bowed her head at the table and wept.

***

The metal screen door slammed. Joylyn opened one eye, stretched, and sat up. 8:15 am. Sunshine flooded her room in golden warmth. A distant lawnmower hummed cheerfully outside, and Joylyn was tempted to forget the bitterness of yesterday with the infectious exuberance of the morning. “Laurel! Tim’s playing outside on the lawn, come watch him! I’m late, I need to leave,” her mother called from downstairs.

Ha! Finally, Laurel’s day had come. Joylyn laid back down and smiled smugly. If this was rebellion, it was fun. Let Laurel take care of it. She could hear her mother’s high heels –which usually signified a wedding or a funeral –clicking across the floor downstairs as she searched for her keys and wallet.

Joylyn rolled over, and listened for sounds of movement in the room next door. Not hearing it, she yelled, “Laurel! Go watch them! You heard Mom!” But there was silence. Rolling her eyes, Joylyn climbed out of bed and glanced out the window, saw Anna and Steven pedaling up the sidewalk on their bikes, as Tim struggled to run alongside them. His deep baby chortles floated up through her window and she smiled at the sound of his blithe innocence. Okay, time to get ready. She glanced at the clock. The quicker she got ready, the quicker she could leave after her mother was gone, and the more time she’d have with Justin. She wriggled out of her pajamas and into the sundress, admiring how her thick chestnut waves fell against the pink seersucker. Two years ago, when Joylyn was mired in that awkward phase of adolescent hideousness, she cried at the sight of her school photograph, an unforgiving representation of mousey hair, braces, and glasses. Strange how you can go from being ugly to beautiful in just a matter of months. Joylyn skipped to the bathroom, glowering for a second at Laurel’s closed door. That lazy brat, always assuming someone else would pick up her slack. Well, that totally wasn’t happening today. She had covered for Laurel long enough. Let her take care of things today.

“Girls, I’m leaving! Get down here and watch your brother,” her mother called again, then the door to the garage slammed as she left the house. Joylyn ran down the stairs and slipped out the front door. Glancing quickly to make sure her mother didn’t see her, she walked quickly through the neighbor’s yard, pausing behind a tree near the street. Her mother wouldn’t see her here.

She saw her mother climb into their old minivan. The monstrous vehicle roared to life and began backing quickly down the driveway. Joylyn saw Anna laughing, pedaling away from the house. Where was Tim? Joylyn leaned out further. Then she saw him, toddling along the sidewalk. He caught sight of her at once, his big sister, playing peek-a-boo behind the tree, and his face broke out in a smile. Stretching out his arms, he began to run towards her. Joylyn stepped forward, a cry of warning frozen in her mouth. The little figure –one moment stumbling along behind the van, the next, tripping, falling, down into an unrecognizable shadowy form. Joylyn heard a woman’s voice, screaming and screaming. The van reached the street, screeched, stopped. She realized the screaming was coming from her, and covered her mouth with her hands, running, running back to the driveway. She couldn’t see anything; the shapes before her weren’t making sense. Then the picture refocused and there was a woman sitting on the ground, holding a child on her lap. There was something wrong, the boy was twisted a funny way. You shouldn’t hold your baby like that, she wanted to say. There’s a hole in his head, she wanted to say. I’ve never seen that before. She stood there stupidly, thinking, thank God that man turned off his lawnmower, it was giving me a headache. Then she realized the woman was her mother, and the child was her brother, and the redness everywhere was blood- on the car, the boy, the driveway. She stumbled backwards, into someone. Where had all these people come from? A neighborhood lady was holding Anna and Steven’s hands, walking away with them, quickly, not letting them look back. There was a voice, “Someone call 9-1-1.” Her mother was rocking back and forth, still on the driveway, “Oh my God, oh my God, my baby, my baby,” as if singing a lullaby. A cool hand touched her shoulder, and a voice said, “Why don’t we go on inside, honey? We’ll let them take care of it.” This is all my fault, she wanted to say. I let it happen. But the confession remained locked inside her, and she let herself be led away. Let them take care of it.

She floats in and out of memories, the way a photographer developing prints glides the paper through basin after basin of liquids, the images appearing faint at first, gradually acquiring color and depth.

Holding tight to her father’s hand, she is walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. It is an autumn night, and the leaves that had fallen to the sidewalk crunch under her feet as she skips to keep up with her father’s long strides. The feeling of nauseating anticipation she feels whenever they visit someone for the first few times churns her small stomach. Fear of the unknown and the unexpected, the breaking of a routine safe in its familiarity, and an inability to comprehend what she has not experienced before makes the world a large and threatening place. Solace comes from the large warm hand that grasps hers protectively, though her father is more distracted than usual tonight, the serious expression softening only when he looks at her. The garage door at this house has black diamonds painted on it in a foreboding design, not like the neat carved squares on their white garage door. She is four years old, old enough to recognize that the not-so-nice houses have strange black designs on the garage doors and lots of lines of black tar on the street, and the nice houses like home are on smooth gray streets, with garage doors painted to match the shutters and the front door for guests. She and her father walk up the driveway of this house, but she remembers no more.

Every so often, as far back as her elementary school days until today, her father will mention his friend, a “dear brother” who had died, slowly, painfully, of a debilitating disease that took away his ability to move from his bed for months, before it took away his heart’s ability to beat. “You came with me once, to visit him, remember?” her father will ask her, after recalling the man’s kindness, deep religious faith, or overwhelmingly intelligent children who graduated from Ivy Leagues and turned down job offers from Colin Powell to pursue graduate studies. When she entered her high school entrenched in the shadows of the looming college application process, her admiration for the brainy children became grudging -very grudging. Yet the father continues to intrigue her. She has no memories of him, but he maintains a constant presence. Only the memory of a walk down a street in late fall, to a home that might have been his, serves to link them.

“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”

-Victor Hugo

a junior at Georgetown, with 50 pages of fiction to write by the semester’s end and no idea where to begin.