Hannukah House Fire

A near-crisp morsel from Pimp My Novel. Chappy Channukah, one and all.

Screaming (at your children): The New Black?

We yell at our children because we can.

In Hilary Stout’s recent for The New York Times, the former Wall Street Journal every-position-you-can-name-in-19-years-of-employment references a national study where, of the 1,300 parents asked, two-thirds “named yelling — not working or spanking or missing a school event — as their biggest guilt inducer …  Parental yelling today may be partly a releasing of stress for multitasking, overachieving adults, parenting experts say.”

Here;s hoping those experts didn’t spend too much on that study.

The eye-opener here is not that we do it, or that damages the children we love purportedly more than anything on earth. It’s that we are finally looking at what yelling actually is: verbal abuse.

My childhood was loaded with abuse. While the physical and sexual elements were more immediately life-threatening, the verbal abuse was no less damaging. No one believed me … UNTIL NOW. (Dum dum dum!!!!)

PS. Yelling at each other in front of our children is just as abusive.

We also yell at children because we still can. Most of the avenues that used to be considered a parent’s right are now punishable by jail time. Not so with our dirty little secret. It and emotional abuse remain the adult way to off-load onto the most vulnerable everything from frustration to fury. I call that abuse.

The next time you find yourself saying, “Well, every parent yells,” try substituting: “Every parent commits verbal abuse.” True, but: desirable? The next time you find yourself rationalizing, “My parents yelled at me, and I turned out okay,” try: “My parents verbally abused me.”

After I yell at my children, I apologize. To them. “I am sorry I yelled at you.” I resist the urge to add, “because you (list their offenses).”

It doesn’t matter how the child responds, or even if they respond. what matters is that I apologized. This action frees my child of the overwhelm I offloaded, returning the responsibility to where it belongs: the adult in the situation.

Take that, technology! Sherman Alexie on Colbert

Bless his cotton socks, Sherman Alexie rocked The Nation last Tuesday. As staunch as ever in his ideals, Alexie took on the digitalization of books in a manner which out-colberted Colbert. He ran that interview with grace and humor, going so far as to get the last word.

Alexie, whose recent is War Dances and much acclaimed, says that while he will adapt his art somewhat to get when he can out of technology, we will not allow his books into digital format.

I don’t know that I will adopt Alexie’s stance , mostly because I haven’t published any books.

The Radio Silence

No posts in a long time, sports fans. Engrossed in a World Series-quality attack of peri-menopause. Appear to be at the bottom of the ninth; hooray! (More blogs later.) First pitch of the new season (blogging; not menopause) thrown by The New York Times‘ article: For Some Parents, Shouting Is the New Spanking.

More Notes from the “My Avatar” Reading

SCENE:  Interior of Town Hall. High, white walls with arching, stained glass roof. Very cool. In the front pews, the writers and techies mingle for dress rehearsal.

Me: Jenny, what are you wearing tonight?

Jenny. Very straight. Nice black pants and a white blouse. Matching black jacket.  Although I did bring a gold-painted velvet coat that I bought in Venice.

Me: Wear the coat. Then I can wear my apricot-velvet pirate captain coat.

Jenny: I’d be the most overdressed woman in Washington State.

Me: I’ll be wearing an apricot-velvet pirate captain coat. (Turns to Vikram Chandra.) How ’bout you, Vikram? Jacket and tie?

Vikram: I don’t own a tie. I’m ethnic. People don’t expect a tie.

Notes from the “My Avatar” Reading

“It’s never too late to have a well-adjusted adolescence.”   Jenny Boylan.

Vehry Intahrchesting: In Summary (and a writing prompt)

Spoiler Alert!!!! If the plot of Rosie’s story in critical to you, read this ”Vehry Intahrchesting” post last.

The three short pieces that tell Rosie’s story (each technically known as a “short short”: 500 to 100o words; usually fiction, but can be nonfiction if identified) were originally published on Jew-ish.com as The Dog (my first fiction commission).

The Dog bounded out of the first prompt in the first writing class I ever took (Rebecca Brown’s “Writing on the Family” at Richard Hugo House, circa 1999). Write about a magical transformation.

I remember sitting at The Rosebud Cafe half an hour before the assignment was due, furiously writing what is published, here, as Part One. I remember feeling a great deal of shame as The Dog chewed into the popular people; in the time I was writing about, kids weren’t opening fire on their classmates then killing themselves. I had to follow the story, however. Rosie was the real deal.

At the time, I was trying to sell my (still-unpublished) first novel. A young adult editor from a major publishing house read it. She didn’t want it, but asked me to try something YA. Starting with The Dog, I struggled for two years to make Roise/Lauren/Jonathan into a novel. The voice was clear. The characters were fairly clear; Lauren is still mushy. I had the plot (who does what, and how it culminates). I had chunks of fiction, but the story (what is really going on) never popped.

The short story The Dog (not for children) existed simultaneously.  It always had three sections; not always the same three. I wrote Rosie and Jonathan’s brief affair. I wrote Rosie’s death. I knew Rosie had been molested, and that her perp came into the story only as much as you see in The Dog. I thought alot about the Torah stories of Rachel, Leah, and Jacob. I wrote one. Out of the blue, a call came from the editor of Jew-ish.com, commissioning a Passover shorty story. Working with that editor, what is now the second section emerged, and the final section fell into place.

In the process of re-posting and summarizing here, I think I understand why the novel never popped. When I got that Rosie would die young and unloved because she was unable to accept her abuse, I locked down. Not long ago, I took an art therapy class. My doodles focused on color. There was always an initial, purple image that came into contact with black-and-ugly, and a phoenix emerged from the collision, as redolent as I could render her.

My artist-self wanted to vary the theme. The therapist said, “Don’t. Your ability to hope  is why you survived.”

YOUR WRITING PROMPT (with apologies to Rebecca Brown):

Write a magical transformation. It can be a real transformation. It can be imaginary. It can be unclear.

Vehry Intahrchesting: Part Three

Rosie Goldstein died when she was twenty-six. She was riding her bicycle. Rounding a corner, the bumper of a city bus, level with her ribs, caught her there and yanked her torso from her hips.

As she pulled away from her two halves, she thought: This should hurt. Instead, she felt beautiful. Not the way she felt, in life, when men looked—though she strove for those looks, that beauty, as much as she strove to hide the effort. That beautiful was assigned. This was like mineral water, coursing through her.

She also thought: Lauren.

Underneath Lauren sat meeting Jonathan in their dorm room the last day of Orientation Week; the gape from Jonathan, and Lauren’s “Stay away from him Rosie,” when Jonathan finally left. She had stayed away. Because Lauren asked, but also because Jonathan—Toches ahfen tish, you shmedrick, dating Lauren while not so secretly pining for Rosie, intermittently avoiding the whole mishegas by ignoring them both. Okay, so maybe, every now and then she held his eyes for a moment longer than necessary. It was the only joy life rendered her capable of understanding until she took that corner and the bus released her. Jonathan wanted her more than he wanted Lauren. As long as she rejected him, he would always want her more. Which hurt Lauren.

In life, that had been important. In death, Rosie saw a garden. Inside it sat the righteous. An effervescent garden, first tropical, set lushly with Buddha statues, then English-rose precise. Gazing into the garden was like eating freshly caught shark, like understanding that the way a man could make her feel had little to do with the way she felt about him. Then something from another’s—or another—life. The milky scent of an infant’s scalp.

She would not enter the garden. Inside it sat the righteous.

She thought: I never believed that shit. Yet she kept herself from entering.

“Oh, but you are,” said the voice.

After a moment, Rosie answered, Not yet. I’m not righteous yet.

She was sucked sideways. It felt like being pregnant. She had never been pregnant. In death, she couldn’t sit, could not lay flat for the plank against her ribs, and down through her vagina.

“How long will you keep yourself out?” asked the voice.

She thought: Don’t you decide that?

“Nope.”

How equitable. How long do most people get?

“Lifetimes. But that’s there. Those who do their work there go directly in. Not too many. Even fewer, the stubborn, sad ones who labor where you are for what you used to term a year. Generally, it falls somewhere between.”

Rosie met others waiting. They experienced the voice differently: a long-dead grandmother, a favorite teacher, or something else entirely, the childhood pet, a wave. She wondered if death reflected the views an individual held about death in life.

The voice answered, “In conjunction, of course, with that which is death.”

Death was the mineral joy that flooded her initial release. She wanted only that.

“As you might have guessed,” said the voice, “there are a few hoops.”

Beating her from inside like a reverse piñata came the ache of everything Rosie had been denied the last time around. Some were laughable, never had big boobs, but others—never gave birth. Again, with this motherhood business. She hated kids. Why did their lack thump harder than the other big never, never fell in love. She could see her family mourning, felt nothing. How could she feel nothing? They were her family.

In death, she watched Jonathan go directly to Lauren for comfort. Her previous self thought, Bastard. Her current self understood.

Boom, sucked sideways. She thought: So when you learn something, you graduate. The lateral pull hurt much more this time. The tightness against her ribs forced itself down her arms, out her legs, against something she had never—could never; yes, say it: Uncle Ethan.

It ripped her open, heart to clit. Rosie wept for what used to be a month. For her whole life. For each time she had slammed down the truth. It didn’t really happen. It didn’t happen that often. It was just his finger. We only see him on holidays. From her clit to heart, she scarred over a crusty brownish red.

She hurt back. Hurt Lauren, hurt any woman able to open flower-like to what Ethan just took. Just took.

This hurts too much.

The voice: “I know, baby. I know.”

Boom again, into a game of Shoots & Ladders. Shoots & Ladders zipped her past dead grandmas and old pooches into a pond of San Pellegrino floated with lilies, with cardamom and candleless flame. Relaxing in the ripples, Rosie discerned glimmers of lives that could be, depending on the decision she made now.

She thought: No one should have to go through that, like with Ethan.

 A young doe chewed at the grapevines growing along waters edge.

Show me the hoop.

Rosie found herself in a purple clearing where hundreds of stars flickered moments: Rosie and Lauren on the bed, the salt waters of ninth grade; here and there, a shimmer from the pool’s surface, as if it had already happened. Her parents were there, twinkling alongside their parents and grandparents, her brother’s children, not yet born. They would name the first after her.

 A line of scarlet connected that child to Ethan. He sniffed her newborn scalp.

 Canines barred, Rosie snapped the string to pieces

Ethan showed no fear.  Rosy growled her best growl. Nothing. She sat on her haunches and waited for him to initiate. It was his fault.

Nothing.

She dipped her head in acknowledgment. He bowed deeply in return and dissolved into potentiality. And the star that had been Rosie Goldstein spun away.

A Digression: Iowa’s Family Values (A Writing Prompt)

When in the course of Vehry Intahrchesting events, we pause to consider the fiction/creative nonfiction opportunities offered by Steven W. Thrasher’s Op-Ed contribution to today’s New York Times.

Read Iowa’s Family Values and come back for the prompt.

THE PROMPT:

“Iowa Family values” is an Op-ed of a personal nature. Search for places in his piece where he could open into a creative nonfiction essay. Work on a version that would result his last sentence, already touching, resonating soundly with that sense of “something beyond ourselves.”

OR

Make the piece fiction. A great deal of his family history is available on-line. Or: start makin’ stuff up.

E-mail me anything you wish me to read, or post it as a comment.

In other news: Rock on, Vermont!

Vehry Intahrchesting: Part Two

For those readers just joining us, scroll down to read Part One.

Returnees: proceed accordingly.

 

The summer after graduating high school, Rosie Goldstein stumbled across the chutzpah to hold a guy’s eyes for a moment longer than necessary. To talk about sex with blunt nonchalance, to French kiss, give a good hand job, a decent blow job, and eventually, to stop giggling. To occasionally benefit from reciprocation—though Rosie also learned to take care of that herself and preferred it. To let each man think he was the only one she wasn’t going all the way with. He was going to tell his friends she did, regardless, as she would hers. So no one, no one need know she was still a virgin.

Rosie hit upon these skills at the kibbutz her parents sent her to in hopes of Jewifying her for entrance to Brandeis University that fall. Men on the kibbutz were bronzed Army veterans of twenty-one or -two. They called her Rosie as if it were an adjective instead of her name and argued among themselves who would pluck her first. From watching Arab women at the market, Rosie discovered that a glimpse of the inside of the wrist was more entrancing then all the nubile skin American girls too willingly displayed. From experimentation, she ascertained that if the revelation appeared accidental, it was more hypnotic. And when you allowed him to talk you into it, you owned him.

While Israel proved that some men preferred not-blonde, Rosie didn’t expect to turn boyish heads at Brandeis that fall. Who knew, guys dressed right out of LL Bean wanted The Dog.

She had no idea why she couldn’t respond.

Rosie’s roommate was Lauren Erenberg. Lauren and Rosie met on the bus to Camp Moshav the summer they both turned ten. They remained “camp best friends” despite the 3000 miles separating their “regular” lives—through junior high crushes, first high school dances, first kisses (Rosie lied), and the college application process. Lauren’s Bubbe intended her for Jonathan, the grandson of Bubbe’s dear friend, Rifka, from Brooklyn. Lauren complained about it often enough. She was complaining about it, now, standing on her bed in her socks, taping a Wham! poster to the wall of their room in Massell. Rosie was about to wonder aloud how Lauren couldn’t tell the blond guy was totally gay, when the phone rang.

Rosie said, “It’s her again.”

“Don’t answer it.”

The phone stopped ringing.

Rosie grabbed one of Lauren’s Baas loafers, and held it to her ear. “Nu, what did you think?” Rosie switched the loafer to her other ear and dropped the Brooklyn accent.  “I haven’t gone to meet him yet, Bubbe,” she continued, nailing Lauren’s Midwestern nasality, “but I’m too nice a Jewish girl to tell you to fuck off.”

Lauren squealed with illicit pleasure, and flung her other shoe. Rosie caught it, easy out. Holding one, penny-side in, to each ear, she flipped between Lauren and Bubbe.

“Lauren, you promised.”

“Bubbe, you’ve been shoving me at him since I was into Shawn Cassidy.”

“Ach, you call that a hair cut? And here, for you, such a nice boy.”

The girls crashed on the bed, wailing dramatically. Nice boy was Bubbe-code for all right, not so handsome, but Jewish.

As the howls subsided into laughter, then toward a satisfied silence, they heard from the door, “So this is the granddaughter of Tessie from the ek velt, Ohio.”

It was, of course, Jonathan. Rosie saw a pale Polish Jew with dark hair and impossibly large shoulder for his thin frame. Nothing special.

Lauren was seeing Jonathan in person for the first time, as well, but what he looked like or didn’t look like didn’t matter. In the cadence of his Bubbe imitation was everything her family wanted for her, everything she resisted, and everything she wanted for herself. Hamesh. She was going to marry Jonathan Weissman.

From the doorway, Jonathan saw the friendly knot of girls on a bed. The one Bubbe had been after him about was what he expected, what those girls were always like. But the other—a real tsatske; sinewy, with well-designed little boobies and sun-bleached tangerine curls he yearned to wrap around his fingers like tefillin.

The girls disentangled, Lauren, giggly and embarrassed, and Rosie, electrified. The way Lauren was looking at Jonathan and the way Jonathan was looking at Rosie—intuitively, she knew precisely how to respond.

 

Tomorrow: the  third and final … for now …