#NotOkay

I have a microblog at verysincerely.com, in which I write anonymous letters about things that amaze me, scare me, irk me. If you're interested, here was this week's:


Dear Chamber of Commerce President:

You. Yes, you. You with the boundless energy. Enough to run a business and an organization, and still coach your sons’ soccer team. Always smiling, always cajoling, the customers loved you, trusted you. Who wouldn’t?

You hired people on instinct, you said, not on experience, not on age.

What did you see in me at age 15? Energy, intelligence? Or did you see in me the shyness, the uncertainty, that would make me freeze in confusion when you rubbed up against me in the dark back stairway? Turning a tight corner into a do-si-do that always ended in a rough full frontal “hug” up against the damp wall, a move I had no vocabulary word for.

Are you thinking of me now as you watch the news?

I remember your name.

But somehow I doubt you remember anything about me but my body.

Very Sincerely,

After School Employee

A fun interview.

I loved this interview at Book Club Babble so much I thought I'd share it.

Me, Babbling, here.

Let's remember this sky.

We were at her house when the light across the neighboring horse farm turned darkly beautiful. This, I said. This is the in-between almost-autumn that I wrote about in ONE MORE DAY. This always-cloudy never-rainy October sky. The still-green leaves that stubbornly won't change color. The metallic gray clouds that can't quite stop the golden slivers of sun. Remember this sky, I said to her. When you read my next book, remember this sky, and this day.

Fan Fiction. For one I've loved and probably lost.

Brian, Before





He was nobody special. None of us were.
There were seven or eight of us at college, mostly sophomores, some juniors, who kept running into each other in the same places – the bakery near the White House, the cheese shop, the ice cream stores -- pretending we weren’t there for the free samples.
After Labor Day when I went down to the blood donation center I saw him coming out, sipping the telltale orange juice, the money safe in his pocket. It was 1981, and his hair was unfashionably short, his blue jeans not faded enough, his button downs worn at the elbows. His sleeves were rolled up, as if he’d been hard at work at something, and his forearms shone with golden hair. He held the door for me with his free hand, and said, “Hello, Robin,” in a way that made my name sound prettier than it was. I still don’t know how he knew my name.
I saw him again in late September. It was still hot in Washington and there was a line at Baskin-Robbins but I went in anyway, wincing when the door jingled, trying to look nonchalant. My hair pulled up because it was nearly ninety degrees -- and because I didn’t want to look like the same girl who had been there yesterday, pretending I’d never tasted butterscotch ripple. He made no such attempts at subterfuge. He was already at the counter, greeting the staff by name. He asked Rebecca for spoonful after spoonful of different flavors, and she deftly obliged him while taking orders from other people. I was fifth in line, and had no money in my pocket. Not a dime.
Finally the manager came out and took a long glance at the cluster of spent pink spoons in his hand.
Great, I thought. Now he’s going to ruin it for the rest of us.
“Jesus, Brian, why don’t we just give you a free pint?”
“Well, Gary,” he said, handing the spoons back to Rebecca to throw away, modulating his voice down to a practiced whisper, “if you have any pints that are close to their sell-by date, I’d be happy to take them off your hands.”
The manager motioned him into the back room. My stomach gurgled with hunger and my face burned with envy.
I couldn’t ask for anything when I was nineteen.

* * *

The mint-chocolate-chip was still lingering on my tongue when I walked outside. He stood near the curb, the pint in one hand, two full-sized spoons in the other. He stepped forward and handed me a spoon. Up close I saw his eyes weren’t completely blue, but held a little green, and there was a boyish scattering of tiny freckles on the bridge of his nose, but nowhere else. His teeth were good but not great; like me, he hadn’t had braces.
“Free ice cream,” he said.
“Free expired ice cream.”
“It expires tomorrow.” He opened the lid.
“What flavor is it?”
“Baseball Nut.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Nuts?”
“What’s wrong with nuts? An excellent source of protein.”
“I don’t like embellishments. I don’t want to stop and chew.”
“Ah, but there are chips in mint chocolate chip. Which is your favorite.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a journalism major. Being observant is part of the job.”
“Being accurate is a bigger part of the job.”
“Are you saying mint chocolate chip is not your favorite?”
“No,” I said. “I’m saying the chips melt in your mouth, and require no chewing.”
“Not if you’re in a hurry,” he said.
“Are you in a hurry?”
“Yes,” he said. “Always. Perpetually. Now . . . have some Baseball Nut before it melts.”

* * *

We were both on part scholarship. We both had loans. I worked in the library ten hours a week, and he worked at a pancake house, where at least one free meal was guaranteed. He took me there and the waitress slipped us cokes and orders of hash browns. He used the pancakes like bread, sandwiching his eggs and sausage and peppers in between them. Like so many adolescent boys, he was hungry all the time. Hungry all the time, and broke most of the time, was a terrible combination. At least I didn’t have his hunger.
Washington in the eighties was a great place to live if you had no money. There were always festivals, free concerts on the Mall, and beautiful places to walk. We walked everywhere that autumn, watching the colors change in the trees down at the Tidal Basin. He loved traipsing over the bridge to Georgetown and sitting on the lawn as if we went to school there instead of GW. He told me simple stories about his hometown in New Jersey, about walking through backyards with his dog, passing beneath the trestles wrapped with lilacs and honeysuckle. It seemed like the most restful and charming place you could ever imagine. I was stunned, years later, to pass through it on the way to New York and find a rusty city clinging to the edge of the train tracks as if it didn’t want to be there.
We didn’t hold hands. We didn’t kiss. That first month, we walked, and I wasn’t sure if I was there to listen, or learn, or wait for more. Was I an audience? I didn’t know which of us was auditioning, or for what. All I knew was that I fell asleep remembering the stories he’d told me, and carried the memory of his blue-green eyes like a pair of lucky marbles.
He found an old theatre that showed classic black and white movies in Dupont Circle for a few dollars. He knew all the bars that had free appetizers, and we’d split a beer and eat eggroll after eggroll, mini hot dog after mini hot dog. He seemed to know all the hidden places, and shared them with me. He noticed details and when he spoke, he used evocative words like ‘fragrant’ and ‘lush’ and warmed them further with the whisky of his voice.
When I think of him now, that’s what I remember most, not his earnest eyes or strong forearms but his voice. I think of how things spilled out of him, his willingness to share, to share just a little too much.
I told my roommate Talia I couldn’t tell if we were friends, or heading toward something else. She did not approve. “He’s just using you until something better comes along, something he’s more sure of.”
“How do you know that?”
“He’s like a penny that’s too shiny,” she said. “Sooner or later, he’s going to tarnish.”

* * *

My dorm was planning a marathon dance for charity, and everyone signed up for shifts. The more popular girls had boyfriends, and the rest of us scrambled to find someone willing.
On one of our nightly walks, I ask him if he’d be my partner, and he said yes, then asked for the date and time. It’s two weeks from Friday, I told him, and he nodded.
“Good, I’ll still be here then.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you – I’m leaving after this semester.”
I blinked. I told him he was being short-sighted, foolish. That if he needed help with his homework, I’d help him. If he needed another job, I could vouch for him at the library.
He smiled at me without showing his teeth. It’s how I knew he was being serious. A boy who is trying to get everyone to like him always smiles, but there are different smiles.
He said that with or without a degree, he knows he’ll end up on radio, or who knows, maybe on television. You don’t need a degree for that, he said, just an audition tape. “Plus I already have an internship at The White House in January.”
“How can you have an internship if you’re not in school?”
He said that he didn’t get it through the career center, but through someone he met at the cheese shop.
“But -- where will you live?”
“I’m still working on that.”
I thought of my narrow bed, my small closet, Talia who was never there at night. I wanted to offer, but didn’t. That is the one thing I didn’t do.
“You can’t leave school without kissing me,” I said suddenly.
“What?” His smile was wider, and I wondered if that was his plan all along – make me ask. Make me want it.
“You heard me.”
He leaned in without using his hands. His lips were soft but thin. I could feel everything behind them, the ridges of his teeth, his tongue, every word he had ever said to me.

* * *

At the dance marathon, I had an enviable shift -- 8pm until 11. Not too early, not too late. I laced up my sneakers and walked to the gym, wondering if he was a good dancer. I imagined he was -- he walked lightly and quickly. I think about whether he knows any specific skills: how to moonwalk, how to two-step. I picture his mother teaching him the waltz in their narrow ranch home, the two of them smiling matching smiles.
In the gym I watched the other dancers shuffle through disco songs that were beyond the reaches of their ability. The twirling silver lights cast long shadows across their exposed skin and I realized they were probably tired. I glanced at my watch. I’d told him to meet me at 7:45, and it was two minutes to eight. He’d never been late before.
At eight o’clock a chime went off and the dancers came off the floor. The coordinator asked where my partner was and I said he was running late. She told me to let her know when he gets there. I waited an hour, pacing at the gym entrance, my mind speeding through the scenarios, before I decided to walk to his dorm a few blocks away.
I buzzed his door and his roommate answered, sounding muffled, and said Brian wasn’t there.
As I walked back down the block I heard him call my name behind me.
“Robin, wait,” he said.
I turned, frowned. “You were home? He said you--”
“I can explain.”
I let him. It came out in a swirl, a paragraph of phrases tumbling over each other. I had to meet a professor for a recommendation and he was running late and then he suggested a drink and I couldn’t say no and I had no way to reach you and then.
“And then what?” I said.
“And then,” he said, taking a deep breath, “then the White House chief of staff came in the bar and of course I had to introduce myself.”
I blinked at him. This was my fault, I realized later. I had asked for it, the embellishment, the thing neither of us needed to make it more wrong or more right.
I turned on my heel and went home, knowing he wouldn’t follow me, knowing he wouldn’t call, knowing I wouldn’t run into him again.
His days of free samples were officially over.

Winter gardening.

I’ve been thinking a lot about eyebrows lately. That’s what winter will do to you, allow you to think about details you have no time for the rest of the year.

A close friend suggested a few months ago that she’d love to see me do my eyebrows, that it makes “such a difference.” Later that week, a friend who does facials, and is one of the most impossibly fashionable women I know, said she knew EXACTLY who I should see, and that I would LOVE it.

Since I’ve never let another person near my eyebrows, I figured, why not? I don’t cut my own hair, after all. I made the appointment. I nestled into her beautiful chair and had to hide my shock when this extremely glamourous eyebrow person said she wanted me to grow them out.

Grow?

Images of my awkward middle-school years flew by me – bad haircuts, bad blue eyeshadow, badness on every level -- before I grew into my long-haired, freckled, Bonne Bell lip-smackered, Love’s Baby Soft self.

“You used to have a youthful, naturally full brow, and that’s what I’m going for. We can always make them more sleek, if you really want that. But first, let’s let them fill in and go a little wild and see what you have.”

It strikes me as being a lot like gardening, this brow stuff, and when I tell her this she laughs and confesses that it’s satisfying in exactly the same way. And after a few appointments, when I start to see the difference, I realize that her advice is a lot like writing advice.

First you have to go a little wild and see what you have.

The Nest Empties. The Phone Rings.

I realized yesterday how seldom the phone rings. How we jump now, just a little, when it does. Is this the urgency people felt when it was first invented? Perhaps.

For me, losing both of my parents in the last few years took the shrill edge off that ringing phone. The fear of it breaking the stillness of the night. The worst has already happened. The calls have already come. And the children were home or accounted for, tucked in.

But just when you feel that sense of relaxation and release -- someone leaves. Someone travels. There is always someone to worry over, now, again. And bad news never comes in a text. (Unless you're fifteen.)

People shake their heads and wonder over women who keep having more children. But this is why, I think. This is why. So they can stave off being alone with a ringing phone.

Empty Nest October Activity Challenge: Denied.

The next plan was for both of us to try a new sport that we both agreed upon. We settled for Stand Up Paddleboarding. I had already rejected Surfing and Ultimate Frisbee as Things He Would Be Good At That I Would Suck At. And the look on his face when I suggested Aerial Yoga was PRICELESS. So SUP it was, and serendipitously, his brother had bought a board and left it at the family vacation house for all to enjoy, thus eliminating Husband Obstacle Number One: Rental Rip-Offs.

But nature had other plans, and neither one of us could motivate to try this in the cold and rain.

So instead, I taught him to knit. Just kidding, haha! But he did drive me to the knitting store in the rain, and then helped me ball the yarn. As he patiently unwrapped

it around his wrists, he said, "This is just like untangling fishing line."

And you know what that means? That means some afternoon while the striped bass is marinating, I can help him untangle his fishing line.

The Not-So-Empty Nest, September Challenge: Golf

To me, golf is not a sport. Golf is a divisive activity that separates families and empties wallets. Golf requires a lot of equipment, takes all damned day, and apparently requires drinking and eating a burger afterwards. Golf is an excuse for business trips that fall on the weekend and go to sunny places while your wife stays home and shovels snow and eats the leftover mac and cheese that sticks to the bottom of the pot. "A quick 18 holes" is not conducive to putting babies down for naps, to helping kids with homework, to grabbing a half-hour of exercise while your daughter is taking a dance lesson. NO. Golf is a SORE SUBJECT, and if I start playing golf to spend more time with my husband , well, then, the TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON.

So, yes, I have a big chip on my shoulder (golf term). And yet -- many of my friends love to golf. We have access to nice courses around the area, my husband has clubs I can borrow, my brother-in-law is a golf pro, and my dad played a mean game his whole life. (Who knows, maybe I have his swing.)

So my friend Karen and I took our first lesson today. We both confessed to each other that we like to learn new things, and hate being bored. We were NOT BORED for one second.

I was outside in a beautiful place on a lovely day, laughing with my friend, bombing around in a cart, making things go thwack and whoosh and ping, SURROUNDED BY YOUNG MEN.

This did not suck.

Blog hop! And then back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks to Beth Kephart via Caroline Leavitt via Bill Wolfe. I think. (Tempted to use the word begat.)Their answers wildly different from mine, you'll enjoy reading!

1.What are you working on?
Revisions on my new book, ONE MORE DAY, tentatively scheduled for Oct 2015 from Sourcebooks. It’s about kidnapping, marriage, religion, and seeing ghosts. But it’s really about trusting people. About being believed. And about being different. Then I go back to writing CHARMED LIFE, about a divorced woman still in love with her ex, who goes bankrupt and is forced to care for her cold and distant elderly mother. And my blog posts will go back to my quest for filling my almost-empty nest with wild hobbies.

2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?
As the reviewers always say -- “it’s surprisingly dark.” Not surprising to anyone who knows me ☺ -- Readers, though, at book clubs I visit, always seem most surprised by beautiful writing. They hunger for it, and not all women’s fiction gives it to them. I try.

2.Why do you write what you do?
All kinds of crazy-ass sh—t fascinates me. I see plot everywhere. But I have to write it my way – and not everything matches up. So I try to find a good mesh between my writing style and my conjured ideas.

4.How does your writing process work?
A combination of knowing when to sit, and knowing when to take a walk.

And . . . I throw the baton over to Merry Jones. If you love mystery, you'll love Merry!

Mismatched.

We’ve finished dinner, and the last pans are soaking. I’m sitting on the couch, eating chocolate, staring at an e-Harmony commercial, waiting for Unsolved Mysteries to come on. My youngest daughter, a senior in high school, is upstairs doing her homework so she can get into college and get the hell away from a mother who is so obsessed with Unsolved Mysteries that she is constantly telling her never to go to the mall at night, because that is when all abductions occur. My husband is behind me, sorting the mail, ignoring the e-Harmony commercial, but prepared to mock any investigative show that comes on before his beloved network programming.
“Hey,” I say suddenly, “do you think e-Harmony would match the two of us up?”
“No,” he replies instantly.
“No?!” I turn around. “You don’t even want to think about it for a second?”
“No,” he says. “We don’t have any of the same interests.”
We met while working in the same industry while playing the same sport on the same team. Those are things in common right there, I point out.
“Kelly,” he sighs, “you love to read, write, knit, and dance. I love to hunt, fish, golf, and ride horses.”
Could he have made me sound any more un-cool and girly and prissy? And made himself sound any more outdoorsy, fit, and Marlboro-Man-y? Those are not really good descriptions of the types of people we present to the world. He runs a company, travels widely on business, but mostly sits in meetings and watches a lot of television. I’m an author and a relatively humorous public speaker who runs around making television commercials to pay the bills. Does that sound like a bookish knitter married to a Marlboro man? Huh?
“We’re both Episcopalian,” I say.
I know for a fact this is the only thing his mother likes about me, since I was not born blonde or listed in the Social Register.
“So we’d be matched on Christian Mingle, but not e-Harmony.”
“You read books occasionally. And we both like movies and we like each other’s friends.”
He exhibit-As me by calling out one of my friends by his nickname for her: “Head case.”
The program comes on and I realize after a few minutes that I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen them all, probably, at this point. The show my husband is waiting for is on in half an hour. My knitting sits in a bag on the table, next to the book I’m reading. I refuse to pick either of these items up; I have no wish to underscore what he has just said. There are busy days coming up: we have volleyball games to watch, a college essay to edit, schools to visit for one child, Parent Visiting Day at college for another. The rest of this month and the next will be jam-packed with kid-related activities.
But what about when they aren’t?
What about in one year from now, when every last kid related activity is gone? What about after that, retirement, when the days are completely open?
Am I gonna read books and knit while waiting for my dance class while he gallops on a tall steed headed to a duck blind somewhere?
Don’t those two people sound like they live in two completely different places?
Jesus, I think. I need to come up with a plan.
And so here it is: Try Something New At Least Once A Month For A Year, until I find something my hubby and I can do TOGETHER. (It should be noted that if it were up to him, we could simply take up a new sexual hobby and he would be happy. But I say we need MORE.) To show that I am a loving, giving person, I am starting by trying something I HATE that he LOVES. I am doing the hardest thing first. Stay tuned. I am dreading it ALREADY.

Changing it up. A tad.

My friends know that for a couple of years now, the words "empty nest" have been on my mind. Where to live, what to do, how to be. Three children are a REALLY big, um, hobby. So having them all gone, as they will be soon? WHOA. I've threatened before to embark on a one-year mission -- a kind of search for a new hobby or cause -- for something to balance all the writing in my life -- and for greater connection with my husband, who has a zillion hobbies I don't share. Still writing novels of course -- and hopefully news on that front very soon (emoticon for crossed fingers is -- X) but I'm thinking that it would also be fun to chronicle my hobby search, here. So stay tuned for some slightly different silliness, soon.

Who's on firsts.

When your children are small, there are nothing but firsts. First word, first steps, first day on the bus. But senior year of high school, there are nothing, it seems, but lasts. The last time I'll hear her in a school concert. The last time I'll see her playing a sport. This spring, there is a ball field on every corner, each filled with parents, coolers, younger siblings with their fingers looped through the back stop fence. I want to roll down my window and call out to those younger parents: Enjoy those metal bleachers. Don't complain about the cost of juice boxes. You never know how much you'll miss cutting up orange smiles for the team, until you stop cutting up orange smiles for the team.

Jump start.

When I was young and struggling, I owned a car that was struggling too. A faded red VW Beetle, a car with smiling curves and winking headlights that despite its rust, radiated cheer and light. A car that wasn't really meant to hold up to a Midwestern winter.

Every winter night I parked it at the top of a sloping snowy hill, and hurried down to the house I shared with 4 roommates. And every morning I got up and ran four or five miles through the icy streets, getting in my workout, knowing if my hair froze at the edge of my hat, my car would not start. Again.

I sometimes think I started running that year just so I could find a way to stay warm.

I would come home, shower, change clothes. Then head up the hill, where I sprayed the door lock with de-icer, lowered the brake, and jumpstarted the battery by letting it roll downhill and catch. My battery, dead every morning, yet brought back to life by gravity every day.

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say my roommates and I did this for perhaps 40 days in a row one winter. I couldn't afford a new car. I couldn't afford a new battery. I couldn't afford to live somewhere with a garage. And so, our cars froze.

This winter, when it seems to have snowed on the East Coast every other day for months, I am reminded of that winter in Illinois. I am reminded of how cold I was growing up there, how my eyelashes crystallized if I dared to cry, how my knees looked blue when I pulled off my tights, how I would walk home from ice skating at the pond without being able to feel my toes.

I am reminded of the snow drifts so high and so heavy, you couldn't open your front door. My father had to jump out a second floor window to get out to shovel snow.

And, most importantly, I am reminded how my roommates helped me with my car, teaching me that technique. And I remember that when I was out jogging in the worst weather, I would spend half my time pushing cars out of snow drifts when they got stuck.

You can hate winter all you want. But you can't ignore it. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum, it forces you to pay attention. Deal with me, it says. It will build character. It will help you help each other.

Valentine Book Bundles! Shipped FREE from a top indie bookstore.

Seriously, how cool is this? A perfect valentine for a reader -- books, tea, a journal -- "Read, Restore, Remember." And they have another one called "Blood & Chocolate" with mysteries.

All shipped FREE from a very cool indie store, Doylestown Books. ORDER a couple now and cross it off your list!

AND -- my novel THE BIRD HOUSE is in one! A great gift for mom, grandmom, sister, wife, or your FAVORITE teacher. :)

Being a Monica.

I think it starts with taking down the Christmas things. Every year, I'm seized by the idea of straitening up and getting rid of stuff. I've been reading lots of minimalist blogs for inspiration. And after digging around this one I've become kinda obsessed with the phrase "capsule wardrobe." This is a whole movement, grounded in the idea of shopping less, wasting less, reusing what you already have, and only wearing what you truly love. And never buying anything that you don't love just as much, even if it's on sale.

Just last week my friend and I were discussing how I wear the same 10 items of clothing over and over and over -- the same jeans, t-shirts and sweaters constantly. Right now my clothes fill two closets -- and if I narrowed it down to what I actually wore -- I could probably do something cool with the other closet. Like a fold-away office. Or a washer/dryer. Who knows?

What can I say, I grew up in an orderly house. I'm probably related to Monica and Ross.

Book clubbing.

When I go to a book club, I usually bring the gifts but occasionally these groups of sweet women -- almost always complete strangers -- insist on giving me a gift. Last Friday up in Newtown this gorgeous bird house was bestowed upon me. LOVE. Thanks Tina and the girls!

The 12 Books of Christmas (you may have missed or overlooked)

A beautifully paced, atmospheric little mystery. And kinda Christmas-y to start off if I do say so myself.

5 Reasons I'm A Writer

1. I hate getting dressed up. 2. That annoying girl in middle school who always had to find out everyone’s secrets? Yeah, that was me. 3. I like high-risk, time-consuming hobbies, but moto-cross is too dusty. 4. Straight As in Typing. 5. Making up stories and saying them out loud to strangers on the bus was not working for me.

After.

Last year, because we were traveling over Christmas, I made a book tree out of all the books that have influenced me. It's here, in case you doubt me, of ye of little faith. I'm kind of ashamed to admit that because of the year I've had, the furious busy-ness, the illness, the sadness, and yes, the leftover laziness, that tree remained up until today. Seriously. So why not just keep it there right? No, this year, of all years, we need a real tree. A real tree because we're home, and I love them, and because I just finished a novel set on an evergreen farm. This year, we need to pay homage to the evergreen. Finally, today, I did what needed to be done. I put the books back on the shelves in the living room, in the cabinet in the den, in the curio on the landing, in the huge bedside tables. Yes, we have books in every room again. But instead of storing the lights, I put them up a little earlier. Still lazy, you see.

Full week.

I rode my bike twice, took 3 walks, drank 2 green juices, danced, ate 3 meals with friends, bought a pair of jeans, saw a movie, sent 4 gifts, read a book, and made breakfast every morning for my girls. Usually at the end of a week I think about how many pages I've written, how many campaigns I presented, how many meetings I went to. But this time I decided to tally the joy. Sometimes being happy means doing a bit more, not a bit less.