Here’s a weird thought: What if everyone only has so many words inside of them? Then sooner or later you’d run out of words, wouldn’t you? And you’d never know when it was going to happen because everybody would have a different allotment, it would be different for everyone—the way hair colour varies, or fingerprints. I could be in the middle of a story, and then run out of words and it’d never be finished. I could be using up the words I need for that story writing this.
Christ, I don’t even want to think about it.
* *
It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I discovered why my mother hated me. Like many unwanted children, I had a recurring fantasy that I was an orphan. That one day my real parents would arrive and take me away. But I never really believed it. I just figured, even as a child, that some people were born with good fortune and others got dealt the shit. You either played out your hand, or you folded. Then one day when I was fourteen ...
This is more intimidating than I thought it would be. Even with all these good intentions I’ve got and the past so far behind me, I still find it hard to write anything more than a few details. Fiction’s such an easier way to tell the truth. Anyway, here’s a big clue: I could only call her Margaret, not Mother.
I told all my friends I was an orphan, but here’s my real family tree: My father went to jail for molesting me when I was an infant and he was killed there by another inmate. I’d like to think it was because the other prisoners drew the line at having to do time with child-molesters, but the truth is he was a stoolie.
My mother committed suicide. Not because she loved my father and died of a broken heart. She just couldn’t deal with real life. Tell me about it.
Siblings? Not a one.
* *
Got up. Looked in the mirror after having a pee. Went back to bed. Don’t know if ever want to get up again. Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for me to write, Jane? I hope not, because it’s really starting to depress me and it doesn’t take much these days, let me tell you.
* *
Definitely a down day yesterday. Maybe I should try to find something happier to write about, like how from the first time I met Izzy, I felt we were knitted together, the way the eye knits a landscape, horizon to sky. I knew we would always be friends. Two weeks of being together with her and I wanted to be more than friends. I realized that I had fallen in love with her from day one, but I never once got up the courage to tell her. I hope I do before either of us dies. Maybe when we’re old and grey and nobody else could possibly want us—though I can’t see anybody ever not wanting Izzy. It’s not because she’s beautiful, which she is; it’s because she’s an angel, sent down from heaven to make us all a little more grateful about our time spent here on planet earth. We’re better people for having known her.
She’d die to hear me saying that. When it comes to modesty, she’s cornered the market. She was like that right from the start.
* *
Here’s something Izzy’s friend John once told me. He was passing it on as a story idea but I never have gotten around to using it yet. I never forgot it, though. We were having dinner together at the Dear Mouse Diner during that crazy period when Izzy was trying to put together her first show at The Green Man, both of us feeling a little lonely and left out of her life. I told him I’d been reading the Bible lately, mostly because I wanted to soak in the language, and how startled I was at just how many good stories there were in it.
“What about the ones they left out?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Like how there wasn’t only a Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, but a Tree of Life as well, and who ate of its fruit, lived forever. That was why God expelled Adam and Eve—not because they had acquired knowledge, but that they might acquire both knowledge
“Where’d you hear about that?” I wanted to know.
“Can’t remember,” he said. “But you can go ahead and use it.”
“Maybe I will.”
He just gave me one of his all-purpose shrugs by way of reply and then steered the conversation elsewhere.
Funny thing is, I was never jealous of what he and Izzy had going. I was just happy that she was happy. I know how corny that sounds, but what can I do? It’s the truth.
* * *
I actually had a pretty normal day today. I got up early and wrote all the way through until about twelve- thirty when Alan came by to see if I wanted to go down to Perry’s for lunch, where we ran into Christy. Alan had to go back to work after lunch—he’s editing a collection of Kristiana Wheeler poems that his press is publishing in the fall—so Christy and I went rambling through the narrow streets of Old Market together, just the two of us, soaking up the ambience, pretending we were somewhere in Europe inside of Newford. That’s one of the things that I’ve always liked about this city. It’s such a hodgepodge of architectural stylings and humours that I sometimes feel as though I could visit any major city in the world without ever leaving its streets. All I have to do is turn a corner.
Old Market is definitely old world. The matrons in their black dresses and shawls, gossiping in clusters like small parliaments of crows. The little old men sitting at tables in the cafes, drinking strong coffee, smoking their pipes and playing cards or dominoes. The twisty cobblestoned streets, too narrow for most cars. The way the old gabled roof-lines seem to lean up against each other, whispering secrets in the form of swallows and gulls. The air is full of the smell of baking bread and fish and cabbage soup and other less discernible odours. Hidden gardens and squares rise up out of nowhere, tangles of rosebushes and neatly laid-out flowerbeds, small cobbled-stoned plazas with wooden benches and wrought-iron light-posts. The rest of the city seems a hundred miles away. A hundred years away.
By the time I got back to the Waterhouse Street apartment I was feeling so relaxed that I sat down and finished “The Goatgirl’s Mercedes”
* * *
I brought my journal along to my session with Jane today, but I didn’t show her any of it. She asked me how it was going and I had to admit that I enjoyed writing in it.
“But even writing to myself,” I admitted, “I still can’t seem to talk about the past. I start to write about it and everything closes up inside me.”
“Don’t force it,” Jane told me. “Remember what we agreed on: no expectations. Let what wants to come, come.”
“That sounds like the way I normally write.”
“So you’ve already got the trick down. What you have to do now is stick to it.”
I can’t remember what else we talked about. Nothing monumental, that’s for sure. I almost told her that I just wanted to forget about these weekly sessions, but then I remembered Christy talking about how long it had taken him to work things out when he was in therapy and I decided to stick with it a little longer. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do with that one hour a week.
* *
The new story sucks. I’ve never dragged such a limp cast of characters out of my head as the ones that I’ve got stumbling through this story. I’d scrap everything I’ve done so far except I know from experience that having let them out onto the page, they’ll never give me any peace until I take them through to the end. Makes no difference to them how shitty the story turns out to be, just so long as I finish it.
* *
Margaret used to delight in tormenting me. I don’t know what she had against me. So far back as my memory goes she would find ways to hurt me, emotionally as well as physically, and it just never made any sense. I mean, what could a three-year-old—which is as far back as I can clearly remember—possibly have done to earn such hate? I used to drive myself crazy trying to make sense of it. Trying to figure out ways to get on her good side.
It was only when I got older that I realized it didn’t have anything to do with me personally. It was a power thing and I was just one more thing for Margaret to control.
