writing

Delicate Handwork

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Miss Della and Miss Faye thread needles one after the other after the other evenings on Fourth Street. They embroider spiraling initials and rosettes on ladies hankies, marching monograms on men’s shirt cuffs. The shop is small and on the first floor of the gray saltbox by the train tracks. They thread their needles at night on the second floor, where Miss Della makes tiny casseroles for their dinner and Miss Faye, on good, days looks out the window watching the trains pass. On bad days, Faye works meticulously on a set of handkerchiefs that were never ordered and will never be picked up. LFS, over and over.

Tonight, Della’s bubbling casserole is a cheesy mix of spinach and eggs and bits of ham. She slices and peppers tomatoes on a plate and sets the table with mismatched napkins, embroidered peacocks and lilies-of-the-valley. Faye and Della never sew for themselves. Some customers forget their orders.

Della at the window rises slowly and makes her way to the table. Faye says grace as always over the simple dinner, and Della doesn’t. After dinner they thread their needles, and lay each on the cleared table in rows of silky prisms. Just before dawn, Faye will be the one to make coffee, dig through the azaleas for the morning paper, and sweep the stoop, even though she, and not Della, is the pretty one.

Once the needle pierces, linen is disrupted forever. There can be no mistakes. Both women have the patterns in their fingers and that’s the magic of their handiwork, the reason customers all come with bare cloth and pay. Linen remembers too much handling, a pencil mark, a misplaced stitch. Faye and Della devote hours of careful fearlessness, the loop and tension of a thousand split-second decisions, holding their collective breaths snipping cutwork arcs without error.

They are artisans of the everyday. Handkerchiefs, no matter how finely hemmed, are made for tears and sneezes and wringing at funerals. Tablecloths catch spilled breakfast and napkins daub lipsticked mouths. Cuffs scratch against mahogany desks and soak in buckets of bluing. Della and Faye try not to think of it this way as the needles slide under and over and under a pansy’s delicate curve, balsa hoops holding the warp and weft taut. The intricacy of the needle holds them captive in the moment and they have unrelenting tunnel vision. Time suspends, spinning like a number three needle on a twisted thread.

Someone broke Della’s heart and scattered it across linen for forty years. If LFS married another, or died, or even ran away on one of the trains she watches from the window, it doesn’t really matter. LFS said no, leaving Della balancing precariously on the head of a pin and sitting at the window.

Della never cries because Faye knows exactly when to make tea or small gossip or to ask for something just out of reach. Faye has always known how to hold a butterfly on her finger.
Tonight Faye will go to the mirror, begin the meticulous art of tortoise comb and finger-wave clips. And Della at the window will watch as she always does, Faye’s ablutions reflecting in the glass.

(Another piece I’m playing with.)

Whew, I say…It’s Christmas Break

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Finals are over. All I have to do now is grade a short pile of exam essays, whip out the Large Buttoned Granny Calculator, cipher a bit, then post those semester grades. I don’t even mind going to the office on a Sunday to do it, because Monday morning I’ll be free and clear. The weeping freshman girls have all gone home, and the conniving boys have followed them. Or is that the other way around? Every student who never showed up to class and mysteriously remembered my name long enough to find my office has packed up. Tomorrow I can grade in peace without eleventh-hour student negotiations knocking at my door. I’ll press “submit,” and then I’ll be done for almost a month.

Ah, yes. Ease and relaxation.

Or it will be after I finally put up the tree, decorate a bit shabbily, wrap the presents I’ve already bought, hit the stores for the rest, realize I don’t have scotch tape, hit the stores again, finally clean my house thoroughly, sweep out the garage, then find the right screwdriver to put my new license plate on the car before I’m stopped again by that officer I used to have in my tenth grade class.

“Oh Miz Fason,” he sighed, “you really do have to put that on the car.”

After all that, I’m lounging. Hopefully with a book without literary merit and a splash of Bailey’s in my coffee. I’m going to wear old sweatshirts and raggedy warm-up pants and scumble about in my socks. I’ll still put on make-up and do my hair because, well, someone might come to the door delivering packages or collecting canned goods. My grandmother taught me that much.

I’m going to watch The Perfect Grandson bounce mightily in his jumperoo and sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to him at least five times a day because both of those things make him laugh. I’m going to buy my daughter surprise Christmas gifts that are just for her, because she’s an exhausted new mom who many times substitutes for the jumperoo. I’m going to play Christmas music on my outdated stereo and make peace with that damned weenie dog that keeps pooping where he shouldn’t. I’ll scan cable for all the best Christmas movies and watch them with all four of us under a quilt on the couch.

Finally, I’m going to write great gobs of nothing in particular. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering, or publishable, or planned. Just massive scribbling to empty out a bit of what I’ve been putting off for the last few weeks. I suspect my need to write is much like The P.G.’s jumperoo craving. We’re both a little maniacal once we’re back in the saddle.

See? I’ve already begun.

Chesaleen (bless her heart)

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The morning Chesaleen died she bought two silver bottles of black hair rinse, which is why when they found her late that night, straddle-slipped on the rain-wet cement steps, they assumed she bled the black blood of a terrible sin. Truthfully, her heart quit on the second step and there was no blood at all, black or otherwise, but that was neither here nor there. The sin was an old one and not a secret, and the sight was more interesting for the way she pointed up with one fat finger propped against the rusted stair rail, pointing in penitence or accusation and laying like a billowy squid in a puddle of her own ink.

Back before the town elders became Christians paying their wives back for assorted wrongs by going to church, they cooked corn whisky out behind Chesaleen’s barn. She was a sweet thing then, with dead parents and a little money and eyebrows arched up like a movie star. Chesalean knew how to play cards and drink one-handed corn. She had a thirsty wink for the men young and old, single and otherwise. Boys always began coon-hunting, but ended up midnight at Chesaleen’s where she was always wide-awake waiting with a cigarette clenched tight in her smile and one eye squinting for the smoke. She wasn’t even a Methodist.

On the way to church, Mama used to make me cover my eyes when we passed her house and Daddy would cough some. There she’d be, between my widening fingers rising out of her own weeds like a toss-headed witch. Chesaleen scared the hell out of me, just like she was supposed to.

“Good girls go to church,” Mama mumbled straight at my cupped hands, “Bad girls go to hell and burn forever til their blood runs black.” She’d look at Daddy and he’d start fiddling with the gas pedal and that was that.

Chesaleen just waived her housecoat a bit at us and we left her swallowed up in road dust.

There’s a story goes that once Chesaleen showed up uninvited to the Saturday quilting at the high school gym and brought a chocolate cream pie. She wore white rolled-up shorts and spiky shoes with her toes showing. She set that pie down on the table with her red fingertips, mustered up a big lipstick smile, and waited. Well, those good women never quit rocking the needles. They never did anything else either, and when Chesaleen left bawling Mrs. Humnoke went right over to the table, scooped up that pie, and threw it in the stove-fire.

“Smell that pie burn,” my Mama said through the quilt frame, straight down at me underneath it. Women and needles rocking in and out above my head and that sweet, burning chocolate.

Two weeks later Chesaleen showed up again, this time with a pretty lemon pie in her plain fingers and a buttoned-up cotton dress down to her knees. Still, the needles kept rocking and the women set their mouths hard against her. She just smiled pretty and spun around to the door. A few minutes later, it was Mrs. Brashear broke the quiet.

“I think she’s trying,” Mrs. Brashear was blonde and not a little pregnant and had soft spots now and again. She rolled out of her chair, waddled over to the table, and sliced herself a piece of that lemon pie before she screamed and fainted. Women leaping to catch the blonde bride failed before she hit the gym floor planks like a felled pine.

Well, that pie was full of maggots, crawling in all that lemon and meringue like seed pearls. I never told Mama that from under the quilt frame I could see Chesaleen wasn’t wearing any underwear. They were busy enough what with maggots and Mrs. Brashear half-dead from the fall.

When Freddy Brashear was born the next day he had a strawberry mark on his chin and everybody knew it was because his mama had eaten Chesaleen’s maggots.

(I’m not yet sure what to do with this piece. I play with it, find new directions, discard them – you know the drill. Chesaleen’s just a character I can’t leave alone. Maybe I’ll write a little bit more of her over Christmas break. Maybe.)

It’s all about the side dishes, y’all

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As I write there are scads of folks out there working the turkey. There are a few ways to do it right, and a thousand ways to do it wrong. Some of those cooking techniques are downright dangerous, and I’m sure we’ll all read about them in tomorrow’s paper. I’m not giving cooking tips at this late stage except to say that if you haven’t yet started cooking the bird by now, everyone’s having chicken fingers for dinner.

The turkey’s not really the point anyway. I know Paula’s probably whiteknuckled over such a thing, but deep down we all know the side dishes are the real star. Unless you’re serving one of those turducken monstrosities, but I can’t even wrap my mind around what it takes to put one of those on the table.

The staples – at least down here in Arkansas – are pre-FoodTV Network. That means canned green beans oozing in cream of mushroom soup, with a generous topping of canned, fried onion rings. It means sweet potatoes with brown sugar and tiny marshmallows. It means cornbread dressing with bits of boiled egg and whatever came in that white bag inside the turkey’s butt. It means butter beans and lumpy creamed potatoes. It means butter, butter, and more butter.

Now, you can bring something in addition to these staples, and should. A guest, whether invited or univited, should have some sort of covered dish in their hands when they show up. I know people in other places bring a bottle of wine, but that’s inadvisable around here. In a dry county full of Baptists it pays to know your crowd ahead of time.


You don’t want to be discussed.

And then there’s the jello salad. I think it defines the holiday and southerners in general. You only see a jello salad at covered-dish church socials, after funerals, and at Thanksgiving. No one looks forward to eating these things, yet everyone does. Every Woman of a Certain Age should have at least one good recipe for a festive jello salad, and if she’s a maiden aunt, two.

Dessert is a topic for another day. Besides, you’ve got cooking to do. So do I.

Declaring a Major

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‘Round these parts, students take a class called “Freshman Experience.” It’s designed to keep first-timers around by giving them some actual study skills and a realistic view of what’s expected at the university. Not a bad idea. If I’d had such a class maybe I wouldn’t have received that “invitation to take a semester off and think about your priorities” letter I got in the mail after my freshman year.

One requirement of the “Freshman Experience” class is to interview a professor about their first year in college and include that information in a lengthy, culminating paper assignment.
It’s that time of year, I guess. Students say they come to me because they think I’ll tell good stories. Or long ones. Either way, I’m interviewed quite often. I like doing the interviews. It puts my fabulously unsuccessful first college attempt to good use.

I’m a cautionary tale.

I did so many things wrong as a college freshman that each year during these interviews I’m able to give a different slant to the cautionary tale. It keeps things interesting, I hope, for the professor who actually has to grade these papers. As a Iraq war/abortion/gay marriage paper-reading veteran, I do understand the value in a fresh piece of student prose. Believe me.
This year’s theme is Choosing a Major That Won’t Be Obsolete Before You Buy The Cap And Gown.
My first semester in college I took typing, shorthand, business machines, accounting, and sociology. I was a business major that semester and had a really, really good time, but not in class. It’s a good thing that business degree dream died quickly. No one needs shorthand anymore, the type of “business machine(s)” I learned were the clickety-clack ten-key variety, and accounting was a hand-entered ledger workbook. Believe it or not, these were core business major courses.

Sociology was handy, though. Still is.
Since successful CLEP testing threw me into my sophomore year, it was instantly crunch-time when I began. I had to Officially Declare a Major. So I did that. Several times. I majored in philosophy, psychology, speech, and broadcasting briefly and at various moments. I toyed with art, theatre (I never forgot the proper university spelling), and English. Only the Math department was completely safe from me.

As a broadcasting major I took a few interesting classes. Mostly I learned to spin reggae and bluegrass records, although not usually in the same radio show. I learned how to edit and splice audio tape with a razorblade, and how to cue up records so they gloriously began the second I flipped the switch. Even if I get the radio-bug again, my pre-digital recording skills are completely useless. FM radio itself is almost extinct, and it will be for sure when all the Generation Jonesers and Boomers get iPods. It might happen this Christmas.

In my recent research on Generation Y, I ran across some interesting information: by graduation, most college students will be taking jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. What? It took almost thirty years for my college skills to become obsolete. It will take these Gen Yers only four or five. Facebook, it seems, is better training for what’s to come than their business classes. What’s scarier is I think they already know that.

And that English major I finally decided on? While it sounded useless at the time, I’ve found that writing never goes out of style. There are entirely too many people who feel they can’t do it, making those of us who do write feel pretty special. In an online, global world it’s the difference between success and slinging burgers at McDonalds. It’s likely that soon face-to-face skills may not get you hired – your writing may be all prospective employers know of you. It’s not going to matter how you look on paper, it’s going to matter how you look online.
And all that major-hopping? Well, it turns out that may be a good idea since the average Gen Yer can expect to have half a dozen different careers in their lifetime. Careers, I said, not jobs. It’s an excellent argument for a Liberal Arts education, if you think about it. I won’t mention that in the interviews, though, because they all have parents paying godawful amounts of money to get them in and graduate them out. It’s too expensive to Find Yourself in college by major-hopping now. That revolution will have to get more affordable.

Oh, I’ll probably still include something about the importance of attending more classes than frat parties. With a college education, you must be present to win. As far as choosing a major goes I’m sure I’ll tell them to find their intellectual passion and hang on for the ride of their lives.

And to look me up on Facebook.

Running off with the circus

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My parents told me I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. It made me think the world was a gigantic circus where I might crawl right out of the peanut gallery and onto the high-wire. Ta-da.

Well, it is. Kind of.

This morning I watched The Perfect Grandson will his left fist into his mouth. It took a long time and many unsuccessful attempts, but he stared down that fist until he had it right where he wanted it. Determination.

Very soon I’ll tell him he can be anything he wants to be when he grows up. I won’t mean it, though. I’ll let my daughter work out the finer points on this when he’s older, but for now my mind is clear: there are some things he simply cannot become.

During his last months in utero and ever since, my daughter and I have made a running list. We add to it as the need arises, or during particularly worrisome Discovery Channel documentaries. Levi can never be…

1. a prisoner. Of any kind.

2. a Bering Sea crab fisherman.

3. a Pro-rodeo bullrider.

4. an ice climber.

5. a firefighter in Southern California.

6. in any branch of the military stationed in an oil-producing country.

7. a bum.

8. a drug addict.

9. a Republican.
I have no doubt this list will grow. He’s only four months old. There’s time. If you have any more to add to the list, let me know.

I understand that telling him he can be anything he wants when he’s grown has more to with the limitless possibilities than with dangerous choices. Fine. I’m perfectly aware that someday The Perfect Grandson will be a hairy-legged, back-talking, reckless-driving, hormone-driven teenager. Those things happen.

I just don’t want him to run with scary boys or vote Republican.

History Lesson

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Antoinette wears her skirt too short for some and her voice too loud for most, but she takes coats, seats patrons for light suppers before the symphony and has history with too many married men who glide their Blackglama’ed wives with a light hand to their seats while giving Antoinette a brief nod that says, yes, I know us, I know you’ll say nothing, of course I’ll call.

She wants to know who recommended us so I tell her, and even though she hesitates, there is a smile as she scribbles a note inside a matchbook that I don’t read then or even later when I slip it into my coat pocket.

When I see the doorman the next day it occurs to me he looks more like a fireman than a doorman, so when I call him aside, tell him, this – offering the pocketed matchbook from Antoinette at the Café Allegro – this is for you, he takes it with confusion until he reads the note and smiles like a man who’s known Antoinette far away from the Café Allegro and far away from the curb at the William Penn Hotel where he hails cabs fiercely like he’s fighting a backdraft, and I see the history of their night or their week or that one regretted refusal settle on him before he says, thanks, and looks on the back of the matchbook for a continuation that isn’t there, that even he doesn’t expect, and again he says, thanks, and I look away because their history is something I stole and it’s lonely shoplifting moments from someone else’s life.