What There Is to See

It was late that night, probably past two A.M. I was driving home from my boyfriend--Keith's--house, and I was driving the back way. I'd decided no, I didn't want to take the winding expressway home. Instead, I wanted to duck through the hills and valleys of what is, in winter, the capital of western New York ski country.

I had a soft spot for the back roads. After all, Keith was always driving me home that way. The road cuts through hills and pitches up and over their crests. There is one hill that is particularly troublesome--if you don't get a good run going up it, you swear you'll start sliding backward, swear your car will do an extravagant backflip like a clown car at a circus, like some Warner Brothers cartoon.

But that night on the way home I had a fine start up the hill. I made it up and over without a problem, and when I glanced behind me I could see the lights of the fading towns spinning and spinning into the darkness. I had to turn my eyes forward then because once I made it over the hill, I had to stop at a small looping crossroad.

And I did. I looked to my left to see if there was any traffic coming, but what I saw was not traffic. What I saw there, standing next to the stop sign was a pale young boy--eleven, maybe twelve--and he was looking at me. He was feet from me. He didn't move. He didn't seem startled. He didn't seem to want to hide from view, like he was trying to avoid being caught doing something troublesome out there at the stop sign in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to scream. But instead I slammed my foot on the gas and dove over the next hill to get away from that hill, that stop sign, that boy.

Mainly because I'm not entirely sure he was alive.

There was absolutely no reason for a boy that young to be standing next to a stop sign as casually as if he were waiting for a bus or a friend or a ride to school. Not at two A.M., not ever. The only reason to be out at that stop sign at two in the morning was to make mischief. But what was there to vandalize? Stretching out in front of him was nothing but night and fields. The only thing there was that stop sign, and what can you do to a stop sign when you're a twelve year old kid who can't even reach the words STOP? If you can't reach, then you can't attack the sign with a hammer, nor can you spray paint things like being a bitch, Mom! beneath the STOP.

I didn't look back. I couldn't look back. I didn't want my suspicions confirmed either way. I didn't want to see the kid still standing there, leaning up against that stop sign, and I didn't want to see the pale white moon of his face suddenly vanished into thin air. I just drove as fast as I could away from there.

For weeks, for months, I avoided those backroads at night just so I wouldn't have to confirm the reality of that moment. What did it mean if I drove that way again, and again there stood a boy in the moon-white light of two A.M.? Did it mean there was a serious sleepwalker in this tiny town? Did it mean there had been some accident years ago, right there on that corner, and every night the boy stood at the sign thinking about what could have been different, what should have been different?

I didn't want to know. I still don't want to know. But today I drove those hills again, looking for restaurants that might want to hire me as a waitress. Today I passed that stop sign twice--on the way to and on the way from that town, one of my favorites--and each time I stopped at that corner I looked to the left and studied the area very carefully. I was looking for tiny mementos: a wreath of dried flowers, a tangle of weathered ribbons, a teddy bear lanced to the telephone pole that stood nearby. I was looking for things a mother or a father or a sister would leave in memory of someone who was lost, a little boy, a son, a brother. I was looking for things that said, I miss you, I love you, come home.

I didn't find anything, though. But I couldn't stop thinking about that night and what it might be like if I got a job at a restaurant over that hill. What kinds of things would I see late at night as I drove home through the countryside with my apron pooled on the seat next to me, with the car windows rolled all the way down? Would I see that little boy again? Would he still be there, looking out across the hills and the winking lights wondering how he would ever get to where he needed to go, or would I be the only one stopped at that sign and wondering the same exact thing?

These Legs, They Are Itching to Run

Last night when I went to bed my legs ached. They were heavy. They felt water-logged, thick, impossible to lift. They felt like they used to feel after I pulled a long Friday night waitressing shift, a shift where I delivered no less than seventy billion fish frys. They felt like they used to after I'd had to dash between kitchen and dining room after having conversations like this one:

Customer: You didn't bring me any tartar sauce.
Me: Yes, I did.
Customer: No, you didn't.
Me: The container is right there on your plate. You've already used some.
Customer: Oh, that? That's butter.
Me: No, that's tartar sauce.
Customer: Oh. Well, I need some more. I put that in my potatoes.

Yes, last night my legs felt like they used to feel after I'd come home from work having dealt with customers who couldn't tell the difference between butter--yellow in color, served in foiled pats--and tartar sauce--white with large green hunks of relish, served in a tub that sits on top of the fried fish, right next to a lemon wedge.

When I got into bed last night my legs felt like they'd run all day, like they wanted to keep running, like they wanted to pick me right up out of bed and send me down the hall, out into the night, down the cooling pavement, through the back roads of this small town until I came to something else, something different, something new.

There's a panic in me right now. This is partly because the semester is over and the summer is stretching out in front of me, blank and dangerous. This is partly because I had a really busy, really nice week last week. New Boy cruised into town and we showed him all that Buffalo has to offer (which, really, was The Anchor Bar and Niagara Falls), then Josh left for his summer job in Wisconsin. Before he left, we had a long day full of things like shooting a BB gun out his bedroom window and drinking shots of Southern Comfort at 2:30 in the afternoon. Now, though, it's quiet. And it will remain quiet until it's time for all the sinning we're going to do at Becky's Bachelorette party this weekend.

The quietness makes me feel guilty. It gives me time to think about things, things like I still haven't landed a full-time teaching gig, things like I probably could've done more to land a full-time teaching gig (I sent out another fifty applications? I should've sent out more! Seventy-five! One hundred!), things like I need to find a summer job, things like I think I'm a bad granddaughter, things like I want to get out of this town. There are crazy thoughts in my head right now. I want to get up and go. I want to pack my car and drive until I find some new college, some beautiful, ivy-covered college in New England, and convince the English department that it needs me, it needs me bad, and they just won't be able to live without me so they should just hire me now.

I think, though, I probably just need to breathe and wait. Breathe, breathe, breathe, and wait.

Notes on My Sometimes Unreasonable Love for Blake Lewis

Last night on American Idol when Ryan Seacrest threw to a commercial, he said, "And after the break, Melinda goes home."

"Notice how he said that," I informed my father, who was sacked out on the couch opposite me. Ryan Seacrest was supposed to be indicating that after the break we'd see film from Melinda's trip back to her hometown, where she would be greeted by legions of fans, where she would sign t-shirts, where she would get her name emblazoned on a road sign at her former school. But there was something sneaky in Seacrest's eyes. I narrowed my own at the television. I could tell something was up.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," my father said. "I noticed that, too. But they would never do that. Never. They wouldn't dare."

"We'll see," I said. I could feel revolution in the air. It was just that type of night. Things in the universe were moving in strange circles.

I felt a little strange myself. I was torn in my thinking about who should go home. Melinda or Blake? Blake or Melinda?

It was a choice I took very seriously because I am a devoted American Idol fan, a girl who counts the days from one season's end to the next season's start, a girl who parks herself in front of the television every Tuesday and Wednesday night so she can say catty things about the people she dislikes (think: Sangina) and loving things about the people she worships (think: Chris Daughtry).

This year all my love has been Blake Lewis, Blake Lewis, Blake Lewis. I announced it during Hollywood week. He sang something particularly brilliant, something that made me stuff a hunk of chocolate into my mouth, and after it was done I sat back up and said, "That's my boy. I'm backing him. I'm voting him through to the end."



There was just something about Blake. I couldn't quite put my finger on it back then--mainly because I hadn't had enough exposure yet, hadn't had enough weeks to obsess over his performances, both good and bad--but I know what it is now.

I'm crazy about his stubble, crazy about the tone of his voice, crazy about his pronunciation, crazy about the way he holds his head when he sings.

When he sings, Blake tips his head back like he's trying to force his voice out from the pit of his stomach. It makes me want to kiss his throat. It makes me want to bite his stomach. It makes me want to curl up in his tonsils and listen to the wind of his voice rush up and over me.



When he sings, Blake doesn't necessarily finish his words. This is something our chorale director would've beat us for back in high school, but on Blake the quality is endearing. When he gets to the end of the word he sort of just lets it hang there, lets the sound fade off or melt into the next. It drives me crazy yet makes me want to gnaw on his jaw like it's a delicious pulled pork sandwich.

When he's not singing, Blake seems like a real stand-up guy. First, he loves his father. He calls him Daddy. And while I'm sure that's a quality that irritates every manly-man in America, I happen to think it's adorable. I'm completely willing to let this man be my father-in-law:



Also, it appears as though Blake gets along with everyone. For example, he and Chris Richardson were BFF as soon as they both landed on the show. Some hateful people might say this is just evidence that he is gayer than the day is long (and if that's true, fine. Instead of moving in with me so we can have sweet musically-inclined babies, Blake can move in and read He's Just Not That Into You out loud as I massage his shoulders and murmur That's so true, isn't it, Blake?--this scenario is equally as appealing) but I really like boys who aren't afraid to love their friends in an open way. For example, when Ex-Keith was drinking beer, he often liked to comment on his boundless affection for his best friend Greg by saying, Man, I love that tubby bitch. It was touching. I think Blake and Chris's relationship was touching in a similar way. And in a way that had me picking up the phone to call Amy and say, "You know, I think I'd pay a lot of money to see the two of them make out."



My love for Blake was cemented on Bon Jovi night when he did the beat-box version of "You Give Love a Bad Name." After that performance was over, my father shrugged and turned to me. "Well?" he asked. "What did you think of that?"

I tried to play it off all cool. "Oh," I said. "Well. Uhm. It was sort of weird, so I don't think the judges will like it." But what I really wanted to say was, WHY WON'T HE TAKE OFF HIS CLOTHES ALREADY?!

Of course, I can want Blake to take his clothes off for two reasons. The first is that he has done something well--sung brilliantly, did a cute little dance move, or beat-boxed with Sir Mix-a-Lot, for example--and the second is because the clothes the stylist has put him in are stupid. That tuxedo shirt on one of the results shows? Please. I thought we--as a nation, as a united front--were over the tuxedo t-shirt. Sometimes I have the distinct feeling that the show's stylist hates Blake. He often comes out onto stage in clothes that make him look a little thick, a little chunky. I also think they put eyeliner on him last week. And whose idea was it to dye his hair? If I were in charge of the show, I would tell that stylist to stop ruining Blake and keep concentrating on making Melinda look so much better than she did when she first came on the show, looking a little like a she-troll that had lived under a bridge for twenty years of her life.

But now, of course, Melinda is gone. And here's where I will say something shocking: I think that was a mistake. I think this week was Blake's week to go. Absolutely Melinda is a better singer. Absolutely she did a better job on Tuesday night. And if those are the merits we're supposed to be judging on, then Blake should've done his goodbye and gone back to Washington. Still, here's the thing: I think it's time for AI to launch a male pop sensation. The closest we've come is Clay Aiken, who we haven't heard from in a long, long time.

And I also think AI would ruin Melinda. I think they would make her do a record she wouldn't really want to do. The two people the show could do good by is Blake and Jordin. And Jordin, who is the better singer, should win. And probably will, unless Blake pulls out something miraculous and beautiful next Tuesday, which, if it happens, I will totally support. Almost as much as I support him making out with me or him making out with Jordin.



So I was happy last night when Seacrest and the producers pulled their trickiness and it was in fact Melinda who went home just as they'd hinted earlier in the show. I was happy that I called it and happy that Blake got to go over and stand next to Jordin and get transported into the final two, the final show, the Big Daddy of All Nights of TV. I'm excited to see what happens and how it all shakes out. And I'm interested to see just how many pieces of chocolate I will have to shove in my mouth to keep myself from announcing in front of my father that I want Blake Lewis to come live in my bed and wake me up in the morning by singing or--on weekends and big events--beat-boxing into my ear.

Oh, if only.

On the Bus

We've been through this before. When I was younger, I was not what you'd call a beauty. In fact, I was not much of anything, save for the recipient of one too many Fantastic Sam's perms.

At twelve, I was logging long hours pining away for boys who played football on the town team, boys who dated cheerleaders, boys who French kissed before the age of sixteen, which is when I finally got down to business. At twelve, I was following Tammy around and watching as she--just by walking by--could cause a group of boys our age to snap their heads around as if they'd just witnessed some sort of minor miracle. And I suppose she was some sort of minor miracle. She was, after all, a twelve year old who didn't look angly, gawky, sweaty, nervous, or confused. Which were all the things I looked like as I trailed behind her, popping open Pepsi after Pepsi because I had a crush on the guy who sold them at the racetrack beverage stand and the only way I could get him to talk to me was to fork over a dollar at a time and then guzzle the pop on the way back to our seats.

In short, at twelve, I was a mess.

However, there was one place I wasn't a mess, a freak, or an ugly girl, and that place was the school bus. I was a different girl on that bus, mainly because it wasn't populated by people who could make fun of me. The high schoolers had a policy of ignoring everyone who wasn't above grade nine, and the elementary kids were too busy discussing what was in their lunchboxes to care about what went on in the middle of the bus, which was the middle schoolers' territory until the very last high schooler got off the bus. That's when we claimed the back as our own and practiced for the days that we'd get those seats by virtue of being the oldest, the wisest, the cleverest of the bus riders.

And while I was flying under the radar of the high schoolers and the elementary schoolers, I was being noticed for the first time by boys. These boys weren't the boys I wished would notice me--none of them were golden-haired Ryan McLean, after all--but they were boys nonetheless. And I wasn't stupid. I knew exactly how much power I had on a daily basis, and that amount hovered close to zilch for many years. But those bus boys got a little doughy in the face when I came around, so I learned to be thankful for the pinch of power I had during the forty minute ride to school and the forty minute ride home from school.

But after awhile--after love notes and declarations of feelings--I let it go to my head. I became a mean girl, an awful girl. I became a tease.

The boy I could tease the most was Justin.



His love for me was established early on, and this love lasted for years. He wrote me notes on the bus, in study hall, in social studies, in English, and at home. Later, when we were older and taking a language, he sat next to me in French and slipped me a note every single day. I would read it, write back, tap it up over his shoulder so it would fall gracefully on his desk without our teacher--an overweight man who was a man fond of smacking his pointer on the desk to scare students when they weren't paying attention--noticed what was going on. We had whole conversations this way.

You look good today, Justin would write. Are you ever going to let me kiss you?

Sure, I'd write back. In the back seat of the bus when Mr. Custard isn't looking.

I never let him kiss me in the back seat. But I did do something in the back seat, and what I did was cruel, cruel, cruel.

One day, teasing, Justin said I should wear my bathing suit to school so he could see what I looked like in it. I'd been bragging to him, telling him I'd gotten a brand new red plaid bikini and that I was going to show it off to all the Canadian boys over summer when I went up to Long Point. Justin said that wasn't fair. He said he wanted to see it. I told him the only way he'd see it was if he happened to show up at the local pool on a day when I was there. I told him that seemed very unlikely.

But I was lying. I was lying because I had a plan forming in my brain. I fully intended on having Justin see me in my new red plaid bikini because no other boy had any interest in seeing it, because no other boy was dreaming of seeing me in it, and because I needed to see what it felt like to be the center of attention, to do something scandalous, to do something that would send a boy's head spinning off its axis.



So I did. One day I substituted my bra for my bathing suit and carefully hid the halter straps under a thick t-shirt so my mother wouldn't see and wonder what on Earth I was up to. Our school didn't yet have a pool, so there was no reason for me to be donning the bikini under my school clothes. But I made it out the door without arousing suspicion, and I made it through the entire day without having a teacher or a friend grill me as to why there was a plaid bow tied under my hairline.

Once on the bus, I told Justin what was happening. I told him what I had in store for him. I said, "Just wait until you see this."

I could tell just by looking at his face that he was dealing with sensory overload. I think he was shocked, pleased, and terrified all at once. I think I was all three of those, too. This was a me that didn't show up at school. This was a confident me, a me that thought I was fun and interesting and impulsive. At school I was awkward and goofy and predictable. But for those eighty minutes each day, I had a chance to prove that wasn't all that there was to me.

I sure proved it the day I wore my red plaid bikini.

After most of the other kids had gotten off the bus, and after the middle schoolers had scuttled to claim the best seats in the back, I crammed myself into a corner and smiled at Justin, who was sitting in the seat across from me.

He wanted me to do it, do it, do it already. "Come on," he pleaded.

I did it. But right before I did, there was a moment--a terrible, sickening moment--that made me sit back and think, Is this really the best thing to be doing? I knew what I was doing to him, and I also knew what I was doing to myself. I was taunting him, and I was trying to grasp some measure of power by exploiting what little I had to offer in the attractiveness department. Justin loved me for things other than beauty. He liked that I was witty and willing to play with the boys. He liked that I had scathing things to say about other people on the bus and people we went to school with. He liked that I could spend the ride home writing stories that starred us as beloved crime-fighting heroes. I was different. Really different. And maybe that was just a little bit refreshing. But with this move, with this little red plaid bikini stunt, I would be trading in some of that. I would be saying, Now worship me for this. And what if that didn't work? What if it did?

Even though I knew there were a lot of better things for me to be doing with Justin right then and there--watching him load a straw with spitballs, for example--I peeled my shirt off and folded it in my lap. Then, triumphant, I leaned back against the window and rode the rest of the way home like that. Justin was happy with the result, and he talked about it for weeks. As for me, I was just starting to learn what a girl could do to mold a boy, to take him up in the palm of her hand, to turn him this way and that, to make him--even for forty minutes, for a bus ride, for a few short years--hers and hers alone.

Long Live the Little Queens

When I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school, I announced I was going to enter a pageant. The Tulip Festival Queen's Pageant, to be exact. It was a part of the annual spring celebration that takes place in the town where I went to high school. Each year when the red and gold tulips yawn open along Main Street, a long train of carnival attractions roles into town. A midway is set up in the town parking lot, and it is dotted with funnel cake and taffy stands, with super slides and merry-go-rounds, with water pistol and dart games.

The Queen's Pageant is one of the biggest events of the three day extravaganza. It's like a mini-Miss America pageant for senior girls, just without the bathing suits. There's a dance routine, a talent competition, a gown competition, and a question and answer session.

And when I announced I wanted to enter the pageant, my parents and brother and Ex-Keith (then Boyfriend Keith) all looked at me like, Really?

I understood their looks. It wasn't my thing. I knew that. And even to this day I'm not exactly sure why I wanted to do it. I just know that one morning I woke up and said, "Well, I guess I'm going to do this."

I even surprised myself when I went to the informational meeting and came away still interested in going through with it. When I'd first stepped into that room, I figured there was a distinct possibility that I would leave thinking, Ha. Yeah right. But I didn't. Instead, I left thinking, Bring it on.

While it might take years of extensive therapy to suss out the real reasons behind why I did it, I can offer some possibilities. First, I wasn't fat anymore. Second, I had my first real boyfriend. Third, I was feeling better and sassier than I ever had before. Fourth, I was coming off a pretty bad heartache, and I think part of me wanted to strut around a stage, maybe get my picture in the paper. I figured the boy who broke my heart would see me in the paper and think about how good I looked, and then he would be filled with a sucking-gaping-awful-evil blackness because he'd done me wrong and hadn't made me his own.

But before I could grace the pages of the hometown paper, I had to face the competition. A handful of my friends were in the pageant with me, but so were a lot of the girls who'd sat court in the Very Popular zone back in middle school, back when people lived and died by those rankings. These were girls who'd had rumors spread about them in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade--rumors that had them losing their virginities, getting pregnant, and being knocked around by their Very Popular boyfriends. In middle school, these girls were little queens, and I was the court jester.

A lot of that didn't matter anymore, but our histories were still there, still weighing heavily on our shoulders as we took to the stage the first time, as we stood in front of our dance coach, as we got the news that our opening number was going to be the most difficult opening number ever seen at the Queen's Pageant. We were going to be swing dancing. And that's when our histories bore down on us. Or maybe just me. I'd never had a single dance lesson. I'd never been that girl who spun circles in a pink tutu or, later, a leopard print leotard. But a lot of the girls standing next to me had. They'd danced at least some or all of their lives. I was screwed.

Everything else I had down. Dress? Check. It was floofy and my favorite color: purple. Talent? Check. I'd originally planned to read a fiction piece I'd been working on, but the powers that be thought it was too morose in subject matter (it was about the end of the world due to nuclear war) and it was nixed in favor of some poetry about Adam and Eve. Q & A? Check. I was like a little rockstar because I knew a lot of big words, and there's nothing that pageant judges like more than a girl who sounds like she knows what she's talking about.

Here's what I know about the dancing, though. I sucked. I sucked bad. I was always shrieking Sorry! to the dance instructor and the other girls when I messed up. Here's another thing I know about the dancing: I only ever did that routine perfectly twice, and, luckily, those two times were in front of the audience. After we'd done it for the last time ever, I remember feeling an immense amount of relief because I'd never, ever, ever, ever have to do it again. To this day, when our song comes on I still cringe a little inside.

But the pageant wasn't only about talent, pretty dresses, and smart-sounding responses. It was about community service, too. It was about being a mover-and-shaker. It was about being devoted to the western New York area. So, part of our obligation as Tulip Queen Candidates was to rove around the area, attending local Kiwanis meetings and mingling with the important men of small towns. We wore satiny little dresses and sat through plated meals of macaroni and cheese and casserole served up in the back room of local wing joints and restaurants. Part of the Kiwanis members' duty was to judge us. They were supposed to watch our table manners, assess our friendliness, and discern how poised we were.

We didn't go as a group, but we didn't go alone either. The powers that be split us up into pairs. Patty, who was still my best friend at this point, was my partner. We attended two dinners--both of ours were at smokey wing joints whose dining rooms smelled like old wood panneling and cheap beer--and at these dinners, Patty attempted to make me look bad. It was cutthroat, this competition. Patty was determined to come off more poised than I was, which wasn't really a hard task since I was just coming into my poise. But she was always finding ways to cut me down. When a grizzled old man I was seated next to asked what I was doing after graduation, I told him I was going off to college to be a English major. The man asked if that meant I wanted to be a teacher. Patty, sensing a way to capitalize on the conversation, leaned over and smiled at the grizzled man. "No," she said. "She doesn't want to be a teacher. There's not really one profession an English major prepares you for. I'm going into political science, though. I'm going to be a lawyer. I'll have a music minor, too. I sing and play flute."

This was some serious stuff. These dinners with the Kiwanis members, who would go scribble down their perceptions of us after the dessert course, were terrifying. After all, how did you make a good impression? How friendly was just-the-right-friendly? And how did you come off as poised? For me, I figured my poise shone through when I didn't kill my best friend, when I didn't stab her with a salad fork, when I didn't run us off the road and into a tree on the way home, even though I was very interested in impaling her on a tree branch.

But there wasn't much time to obsess about how well or not well those dinners went. The talent part of the competition was a major to-do for most girls. Me, I was easy. In the way of props, I asked for a fake tree and a bench. I sat on the bench under the fake tree and read my poetry. Other girls, though, didn't have it so easy. Some required fireworks--not real fireworks, of course, but things that were advanced for a high school production: music, projectors, sets.

One of the girls did a skit to "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Another had a trellis and a projector for her interpretive dance to a Shania Twain song. Patty, always a fan of drama, had scripted a special note to be read before she went on. She wanted her performance--she was singing "Unforgettable"--to be dedicated to her just-born nephew, her middle sister's child. This sister--unwed and young--had slept with and been impregnated by a boy who then turned out to be gay, a boy who hightailed it out of state with his lover as soon as humanly possible.

Hers had been the most uncomfortable baby shower I'd ever been to. Patty's family was religious, and none of the situation really sat well with them. People were bone-white and dead-quiet at that party. Amy and I sat in a corner and tried not to say anything inappropriate, which was surprisingly difficult, given the situation. It was hard to accept that Patty's sister was just-graduated and pregnant. At the shower all I could think about was this one night the sister had come home from a date with the boy who would eventually get her pregnant. They'd been out walking, she said. It started raining. The air was thick and heavy with the smell of spring and blooming flowers. They were standing underneath the dripping branches of a lilac bush, and that's when he kissed her. It was the most amazing thing, she'd said. The most amazing feeling ever. At the time she told us that story, I hadn't been kissed. In fact, I was a long way off. But I felt something tug inside me. I knew what she meant. I could imagine the perfectness of that moment. I could imagine how everything smelled and tasted and felt like love.

But at her shower, I wasn't thinking about the loveliness of that anymore. I was thinking, Isn't it funny to go from there to here? But the drama wasn't about to end there for Patty's family. A few months later, both Patty's sisters would be hit by a drunk driver. Her pregnant sister went into labor and delivered that night.

And it was that fragile boy who was the feature of the slideshow that Patty had playing behind her as her voice skimmed over the notes of the old Nat King Cole song. A lot of people thought that was sweet, that was cute, that was precious. But I couldn't help think about the way Patty had looked when she sold me down the river over a plate of macaroni and cheese. I couldn't help but think about the cool smile on her face, the sly brush of her eyelashes against the hollows under her eyes, the way her voice came out as practiced as a weathered CNN anchor's. That was a girl who wanted to win, and she wanted it bad.

And it's not that I thought she was happy about what happened to her sisters and the baby, but I did think she was interested in the edge it could give her. There seemed to be a new confidence in her. It showed in the way she held herself, in the way she treated people. She knew she had a human interest story with bite. She knew she had a story that would look good in the paper, a story that would have audience members reaching for tissues as the photos rolled across the screen and she purred through the song's throaty notes.

But even as much as she thought her story was the golden ticket and her way to the crown, it wasn't. Just like my poetry about Adam and Eve wasn't my way to the crown. We both watched as one of the other girls--a girl who'd donned tap shoes and skittered across the stage the way she'd been doing since she'd been born--accepted the crown and took her victory walk clutching a dozen roses to her dress.

However, my vantage point was a little different than Patty's. I'd somehow managed to snag the third runner-up--a feat that had me crying as soon as the curtains snapped shut and all the girls gathered round to congratulate the court and the newly-crowned queen. I just couldn't help myself. I didn't realize until that moment how much I had riding on the results. I didn't realize how much it would mean to me to find a spot in the court, to actually get my picture in the paper, even if it showed me with puffy, tear-splotched cheeks.

While I stood on the tiered platform with the other runners-up I felt a little bit invincible, a little bit like this moment was trying to tell me there were better things to come, like I was going to find out that the things I wanted might come just a little bit easier now that I felt more capable to seek them out. And while I clutched my own roses to my dress and smiled into the flash of cameras, I thought about the night at the Kiwanis meeting, about Patty leaning over and informing the room that mine was a silly degree, a silly dream, a silly thing to want. While I stood there, I hoped whoever was taking pictures for the local paper was catching my smile the way it felt on my face right then. It was a smile whose angle and strength and earnestness was saying We'll see about that, won't we? We'll just see about that.
~~~

And, to celebrate that this weekend is, in fact, Tulip Festival weekend in the old hometown, here are some pictures of my pageant year:



This the show opener. Each girl ran out on stage, chirped out her name (Hi, I'm Jess!!!!!) and then got in place for the swing dance.



Here we are in the middle of the opening number. The circled girl is me, and, yes, I admit that I am wearing gross khakis and a too-big shirt. I thought it was cute at the time. I now recognize the error of my ways. The arrowed girl is Patty and Patty's This Smile Is Way Too Big to Be Sincere smile.



My jazz hands were working overtime.



Here's a washed-out picture of me doing a tour of the stage during the gown competition.



One of the perks of being a Tulip Queen contestant? Getting to ride around in a sporty borrowed car. The only problem with mine was the convertible top wouldn't go down, so I had to hang out the window to toss candy and wave.



Here I am accepting the flowers after being named to the court. If you look to the right, you can see Patty distracting Mary and Becky. It's possible she's saying something like, "Her? You've got to be kidding me!"

My Brother's Idea of an Excellent Gift

I called my brother the other day to see what he had up his sleeve for the looming Mother's Day celebration that he and I needed to put together for this coming Sunday. I felt the need to call for several reasons: first, my brother tends to forget important dates--dates, for example, that are anyone's birthday but his own. I figured it was entirely possible that my brother didn't even know that this weekend was the weekend we were supposed to turn my mother's trailer into a big festive how-do-you-do to celebrate the fact that she spent numerous hours in labor with us.

Second, I know how my brother is about giving gifts. One year for Christmas he gave my father a Snickers bar and a pack of spearmint gum. This year for my birthday he gave me a can of off-brand corned beef hash. My brother generally believes that spending under five dollars is appropriate for any gift-giving occasion. After all, the less money he spends on the people who raised and love him, the more money he can spend on pear-flavored vodka at the Peace Bridge Duty Free.

So I called as a reminder. I called to check in. I called to needle him for information. I wanted to know what--if anything--he had in mind for Mom's gift.

"Don't worry about it," he told me, his voice confident and booming. He was at work, and it was clear that he wanted to sound Mature and In Charge. "I've got it covered."

"Oh?" I said. I kept my own voice light and vaguely uninterested because I know that more than anything, my brother hates to think people are checking up on him, to think people are messing with his business. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well," he started, "we've got these things at work..."

Red flag, red flag, red flag. My brother--when he's not texting girls named Chastity! or Emmy! or Krissy!, and when he's not slipping crumpled dollar bills that could very well belong to me into the G-string of some Canadian stripper who whispers Thanks for the money, eh! into his ear--works at a tool store. A tool store.

What, I wondered, could my mother possibly want from a tool store?

"What things do you have at work?" I asked my brother.

"Coasters," he said. "These coaster-things. They're clear. You can slide photos into them."

I thought for a moment about what picture I would ever want slid underneath a coaster so that I could set my condensating drink on top of it. I figured a picture of my brother would be appropriate enough. A picture of when he was little and chubby and bullfrog-cheeked. A picture of him before he grew up to be the type of boy who figured that what my mother would want more than anything for Mother's Day was a set of see-through coasters that could be fitted with photos that would be covered up and sweated on by a summer's worth of vodka-tonics and mojitos.

"Wow, that's great," I said, lying through my teeth. I didn't want to tell him it was a horrible idea--which it was--and that Mom already has enough coasters to get by with. She has formal coasters decorated with ivy and grapes, and she has informal coasters that she and her boyfriend have filched from local bars that serve cheap beer and good fish fries. My mother needs another set of coasters like she needs a hole in her head.

"I know," he said. "Pretty good, huh?"

And today I tried one more time--tried to nudge him in the right direction, to get him thinking about something that would be less likely to make it into my mother's next garage sale. I even spoke his own language. I sent him a text. Maybe you should think about flowers, it said. A single rose to go with the coasters. That would be affordable. And nice.

A few minutes later my phone flashed, and it was with a response from my brother.

Perhaps, it said, which, in my brother's language, means the following all at the same time: Are you crazy, Hell no, and Yeah right.

Sixty-Two Down & Thirteen More To Go

I've been grading research papers for the last four days. They have to be done and back to my students by tomorrow, so the end is in sight.

But until then, let's meditate on the goodness that is Buffalo hockey:



I love that man.

I Like Hats

Cinco de Mayo: A Comparison

2006:



Drink + Hat

2007:



Drink + Hat

I sense a trend.

I'll Never See That Money Again

Today when I was taking a break from organizing the crushing amount of research papers I have to read in the next week, I wandered into the laundry room--which, coincidentally, is also the pantry--and I stared at the shelves of food, daydreaming about what I'd make for dinner.

That's when I heard a jiggle at the front door. I froze. Nobody was supposed to be coming to the house today. But there was definitely someone out there. They were jiggling the handle, they were clattering with something, they were turning the doorknob.

I braced myself for the worst: a wild-eyed gunman intent on breaking into the house and looking for anything of value--maybe the last piece of red velvet cake or that blue ceramic duck or that stuffed monkey my father bought for his girlfriend.

But I didn't get that. I got my brother.

"Jesus, you scared the hell out of me," I said. "I didn't know you were going to be out here today."

"Me neither," he said. "I had to go to the dentist, and now my friends and I are going out to dinner." He smiled at me, to prove the thing about the dentist. Then he brushed past me and barricaded himself in the bathroom.

"Are you okay?" I asked through the door.

"Fine," he said. "I'm just looking at my teeth."

My brother is bizarre about his teeth. Honestly. You will never meet someone more obsessed with teeth and oral hygiene than my brother. It takes him half an hour to get ready for bed at night because he engages in what he lovingly calls The Procedure.

The Procedure is a complicated process my brother goes through after brushing his teeth. There's flossing, of course, but then comes several elaborate mouth-washings. There's a flouride wash that has to stay in his mouth for two minutes, and there's another bacteria-eliminating wash that stays in for another two minutes. After those scrubs, flosses, and washes, my brother leans in very, very close to the mirror so he can scrutinize his teeth. He opens wide, peels his lips back so it looks like he's growling at his relection. He picks with his fingers, he rubs with his tongue. He snares every single particle that was living in his mouth.

It's quite the thing to see, and it's quite the time consuming process. A person could do a lot of things in the time it takes my brother to finish The Procedure--solve complex math problems, skim an entire copy of Ok! magazine for black-barred pictures of Britney Spears's lady parts, or bake a double fudge layer cake. In short, my brother is as bad as a cold-creamed old lady who spends thirty minutes in the bathroom smoothing on different Oil of Olay products that promise to eliminate crow's feet and age spots.

And today my brother spent a few contemplative minutes in the bathroom, examining the job our dentist had done on his teeth. Apparently satisfied, Adam reemerged.

"Hey," he said. He leaned against the doorframe to my room and surveyed the mess of extra credit papers and portfolios that were spread out across my floor. "So," he said, "how much money do you have on you right now?"

What I really wanted to tell my brother was it was none of his business how much money I had. But I didn't say that. I shrugged. "I don't know," I said.

"Can I have some of it?" he asked.

And then I did something very strange. I got up, found my purse, and opened my wallet. I had two fives. I handed them over.

"Thanks," he said, and tucked them into his pocket.

"Just what are you going to be doing with my money?" I asked, because I had an idea, and that idea involved Canadian girls in thongs, Canadian girls whose business it was to rub their private parts up and down an oily pole in the middle of a velvet-lined room.

"I'm going to use it for dinner tonight," he said. "We're going to watch the Sabres game at a bowling alley outside Franklinville. I'd like to order something more than just ice water."

"Okay," I said. I returned to sorting through the papers.

"Booze is expensive," my brother said, absently. He still had one hand in his pocket, and that hand was clutching my money.

"You're going to buy liquor with it?" I asked. I have no problem with my brother buying liquor, but I do have a problem with him doing it with my money. Because I could buy liquor with that money, and that's way better.

"No," he said. "DINNER." He emphasized the word like I was a moron, like I hadn't listened, like I didn't know anything about anything. "All my money is gone because booze is expensive."

My brother was taking my money because he'd spent all of his weekly allowance on booze. He was taking my money because he doesn't have access to his. My mother does. She has had my brother on a tight budget ever since he dropped out of college and frittered away his bank account on spicy wings and cheeseburgers at Hooters.

If I hadn't been so tired and so beaten-down by the myriad of wrong things I was seeing in my students' papers, I would've told him it was rude to waltz into a room and demand money from a relative just because there had been an incident--a bender of sorts--and that all the week's money had been wasted on a cheap bottle of vodka and a couple six packs of whatever beer was on special at Tops. But I said nothing. I just gave him a look. A stern look. A look I hoped said, I'm telling Mom if I don't get that money back.

But deep down in my heart I knew I wasn't getting that money back. He promised he'd give it to me on Friday when he gets paid, but I know that money's already been spent, already been promised away to some sort of thing my brother will do this weekend. It's gone forever, just like he was shortly after he got his hands on it. He was going to Walmart, he said, because he needed some things--things that he would pay for with his debit card because Mom had already okayed the purchase. When I suggested he should try paying for dinner with his debit card, he looked at me like, Are you insane?

"Mom doesn't like me to do fun things with the money that's in the bank," he said. "I can't do anything good with that money."

And so my brother does it with mine.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night

This weekend I baked somewhere around 250 cookies to celebrate the end of the semester, which was today. I made chocolate chip cookies and sandwiched them together with vanilla frosting, and I also made a double chocolate cookie recipe my college roommate somehow managed to steal from our favorite bakery in Fredonia. I turned out sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet of these cookies until they overflowed from the containers I was trying to store them in.

Today I lugged those cookies up three flights of stairs to my office, where they then sat until one of my students--one of my most-loved engineer boys--happened by my office and slumped into one of the crusty chairs the powers that be stuffed into our office in hopes that student visitors wouldn't mind sitting on something that looked like it'd been peed on by the entire population of the Whispering Pines Assisted Living Community.

This student didn't mind at all. "Hey," he said. He sounded tired, beat-down, half-dead.

"Hi there," I said.

"Can I just tell you about my weekend?" he asked, and I said of course. So he did. He told everything that happened since the time I'd seen him last. And it was a lot of stuff. The kid was having a rough week, and--more importantly--a rough semester.

When he finished listing all the things that went wrong, the student took a deep breath and slumped against the back wall. He looked like he was two seconds away from imploding. And if that happened, the only evidence that he had ever been in my office would've been a soggy Sabres hat perched above the pee stained chair.

I felt I needed to lift his spirits somehow. "Here," I said. I unwrapped the first package of cookies. "Have one. No, have two."

He took two. He stuffed them into his mouth. "I need help with my Works Cited page," he said, and he looked so sad and so tired that I nodded and peeled back the wrapping on the second package of cookies.

"Okay," I said. "And here, have another."

By the time he'd left my office, that student had eaten somewhere near six or eight cookies. I felt very proud of myself, very much like I was on the right track to becoming the type of mother and grandmother I want to be: the type who takes one look at her children and grandchildren when they step in the door and says, "You look skinny. Come into the kitchen. I'm making you a pie."

Later, this student and my other favorite engineering students sat in the hallway outside of our classroom shoving those cookies in their faces and eating half the pan before any of the other students even got there. But I didn't stop them. "Go, go," I said, because, really, I'd made those cookies for them. I'd made them so I could do one last thing for them, so I could extend one last gesture, one last Let me take care of you, okay, boys? We took good care of each other for thirty weeks. And there was nothing I loved better these last two semesters than having those boys around me all the time, having them around to say, We love you, Jess! and What are you going to do without us, Jess?

The truth is, I don't know. Mourn, probably. Mope. Kick around the campus and wonder what they're doing now, how they're doing in physics, how much they're eating, if they're getting enough sleep, if they need more cookies in their diets. But at least today I could contribute.

And at least I know I haven't seen the last of them.

"We looked up your fall schedule online," one of them admitted to me this week. "We wanted to see when and where you were going to be around. You know we're going to come by all the time."

And I thought, Thank God.

There Was Much Screaming, Much Stomping

Here's what I remember about last night: It's Game Two. I am standing on a table. Or the bench to the table. I am considering popping the guy next to me because he had, mere seconds before, turned to yell at me and Amy--"CALM DOWN!" he said as we hysterically screamed things like Oh my God, do not score on us! Do not score on us! Do not score on us in the last minute!--but I don't pop him. I know he was thinking those things, too, but he chose not to scream them in the banshee-like levels Amy and I were using.

I am stomping my kitten-heeled feet on the table-bench, and I am screaming, "SUCK IT, RANGERS!" I am pointing to one of the many TVs broadcasting the Sabres game and shrieking my love for all things hockey. At this point of the night, after too many vodkas thick with lime wedges, I am screaming how much I love my future husband, how good he is, how wonderful, how flexible, how beautiful.



I am watching Amy do victory dances to celebrate. I am watching her pump her fist. I am watching the entire bar high-five. I slap the hand of every bearded man--because almost every Buffalo boy is sporting a playoff beard right now--and I slap the hand of every person at my table. Twice.

It was a good night:

Working Girl

I need a summer job. The semester ends soon, and I'll be officially unemployed until the end of August. I've been preparing for this since last summer, since before I got my university job, back when I was convinced I was going to have to wait tables full time or work at the local credit recovery agency for the rest of my life.

Anyway, I've been preparing. It's been hard to prepare. Each day I have to wake up and say to myself, You are only two months away from waiting tables, you are only one month away from waiting tables, you are only weeks away from waiting tables. Some people--mostly my parents--think I'm being too dramatic about it. They think it's no big deal, no big shake. They don't understand why it would bother me to go back to waiting tables after receiving a terminal master's degree, after I have been hired on as an instructor of college English. My mother especially thinks I'm being a baby about it. When I ask her how she'd like it if she had to wait on one of her students she says she'd like it fine. What's the big deal? she says.

The big deal is this: it's one of the world's most uncomfortable experiences to wait on one of your students--to bring him a nice steak dinner and an extra potato when his father asks it, even after he says, No, no, it's okay, Jess, you don't have to! because he feels weird, weird, weird that the girl who just spent fifteen weeks teaching him how to string together coherent sentences is standing in front of him with a coffee pot in one hand and a bottle of ketchup in the other. I did that while working banquets in Minnesota. I don't ever want to do that again.

The chances of that happening now, though, are slim. I live very far away from my university, and the places I'd wait tables are places my students wouldn't be likely to go. This makes me feel slightly better about returning to the world of serving, to a world where men think it's okay to talk about your nipples as if you aren't standing in front of them, refilling their water glass.

It makes me feel slightly better, but not entirely better.

My father thinks I'm crazy for not driving to the restaurant where I used to work and asking for my job back. You know the place! he says. You know the menu and the people and the way things work! And it's true. I do know those things. I can still hear myself reciting the list of potato choices (We have baked, fries, curly seasoned fries, cottage fries, or potato salad!), and I can still see myself sucking up to all the cooks on the off chance that I will really screw up someday and need them to make me food that I forgot to ring in, and I can still myself sitting at the bar and counting out a filmy stack of ones onto the slate counter.

It wouldn't be horrible, but it would be strange. It would be contrary to what I was hoping and assuming on my last day of work. That night after I clocked out for the last time, after I had my last post-shift-drink, after I had appropriately nuzzled every boy I loved (the cooks, the dishwashers, the bartenders), I walked out thinking See ya! Adios! Au Revoir! I walked out thinking, I'll never have to do that again. I foolishly thought that once I got my terminal master's degree, life wouldn't be a struggle anymore. I wouldn't have to have some crappy part-time job that involved flipping salad bars, washing down a patio, zoom-brooming the carpet where some parents let their baby toss half a container of gummed-down Saltines.

While working at the restaurant, I'd secretly felt sad for the girls who came back to work after graduating college. They had full-time jobs--they worked as teachers and social workers--but they were still driving to the restaurant and slipping into long black aprons, they were still floating beer-loaded trays on the palms of their hands, they were still asking people how they wanted their fish fries done--battered, broiled, or breaded?

I knew why they were still working at the restaurant. I wasn't stupid. While these girls made decent money at their full-time jobs, it was hard to give up that extra money even two shifts of waitressing brought. They might be able to walk out with $300 in their pockets, and that money could go to all the best things in life: wedding funds, vacation funds, clothing funds.

But it didn't stop me from thinking, God, I hope I never have to do that.

Well, I've got to do that. I'm coming back, fully degreed, with a decent resume and decent accomplishments for someone my age. But I've got another of those muggy summers in front of me--a summer where I come home with aching legs and a pocket bulging with dollars, a summer where I'll have waitressing nightmares every week (I forgot to bring table 52 extra tarter sauce! I never brought table 32 their water! I can't remember where to find the computer!)

Yesterday I went around my little country town and I applied to a few places that have an atmosphere, menu, and clientele that won't throw me into a never-ending spiral of depression, a spiral of Where did I go wrong?! I haven't yet convinced myself to go back to my old restaurant, to become one of those girls I'd felt sorry for three years ago.

But yesterday I got to sit down and interview with one manager--a young girl, probably younger than me, who sported a nose ring and a earrings made out of turquoise feathers.

You could tell I made her nervous. "Do you think I'm doing an okay job with this interview?" she asked me. "Maybe I should practice on people who already work here. Maybe that'll make me feel better about it."

There was an ant or a spider crawling on the table as she was saying this. I didn't want to flick it because I thought it would embarrass her--after all, what did that say about the cleanliness of where we were sitting? What did it say about whoever wiped down that booth? I also didn't want to look closer because if it was a spider, I'd be pinned to the booth by a crushing tumble of fear and revulsion, and she might very well think I was psychotic, that I had some sort of mental disorder than kept me from functioning like a regular member of society. I just smiled and told her she was doing a fine job, that it was very standard, that she was asking pretty normal questions in a pretty normal way. I ignored the spider-ant.

When she fanned open the application I'd filled out, she looked for quite a long time at the education section. "Wow," she said. "Wow, that's a lot of stuff to list. You're really overqualified for this job."

And that's when I had to do something very, very hard. I had to plaster a smile to my face and look her in the eye--without sighing, without reaching for a knife and gouging it into my eye--and tell her that was a very nice thing to say. "Thank you," I told her. "Thanks very much."

One of the Ugliest Things I Can Tell You

I'll tell you this about yesterday: I was awake only six hours.

I'll tell you this about Monday: I spent ten hours in the hospital.

It wasn't for me. I wasn't the one wearing the flower-patterned gown. I wasn't the one gagging into a metal pan. I wasn't the one airlifted from one hospital to the next. I wasn't the one who had a stroke, the one who had blood pooling in the back of my skull, the one whose eyes clouded over, smogged, grew filmy.

That was my grandfather.

My mother called around 8PM Monday night, told me my grandfather had been taken to the hospital, that they thought he had a stroke. I told her I'd be right there. I hung up the phone, changed my clothes, shrugged into a sweatshirt, put on some shoes, walked out to my car. I waited and waited and waited. I thought it might take a few minutes, that I might feel one way or another about the news. After all, my grandfather was in the hospital. That kind of news would make a normal person feel something, react in some way. What I reacted to was my mother. I didn't think, Oh my God, my grandfather! I thought, I should go be with Mom.

I drove the empty back roads of the country town where I grew up. My highbeams bounced off the creek bed, the pine trees, the wet pavement. I kept waiting. Nothing was coming. No sadness, no fear, no regret, no nothing. I was just a girl driving a car on a dark street.

The only thing I could really think about was what I'd heard on the radio during my drive home from work. One of the local stations had a woman on--a woman who was attending the funerals of the Virginia Tech students who died last week. She wasn't a relative, a friend, or a sympathizer. She was a member of a group who was preaching what they believed to be the truth behind the Virginia Tech shootings: that those students deserved to die. She said they were wicked and evil. She said they were shot for a reason, that God had found them to be lacking and undeserving and so he devised a way to eliminate them.

The DJs yelled and fussed. They called her crazy. They called her a heartless bitch. She told them they were going straight to Hell. Then she said most of America was, too. Most of the people listening to the radio right now, listening to their silly little show and their silly little antics, all those people were on an express train to Hell. You're evil! she shouted. All of you! Just evil!

I flicked the radio off then, but I couldn't keep myself from thinking about that lady and her thoughts about those students who died, her thoughts about all of us. I wanted to find her and hold her down, tell her that's not how the world or God works, but the more I thought about it the more I thought, What if she's right? What if we are all evil?

Several hours later, I wasn't feeling all that good about myself. I was pulling into the cratered driveway of the hospital and wondering if deep, deep down I wasn't a very good person. I was wondering if I had an evil bent to me, if something inside had gone wrong, had twisted until it was skewed and defective and not good. I figured maybe this thing with my grandfather was punishment for past wrongs I'd committed against him and my family.

For a long time my grandfather and I didn't speak. We didn't speak because of what happened on Christmas Eve in 2002. My family was gathered around the table my grandmother had prepared. My uncle was there, my mother was there. My brother and my boyfriend were also there. So was a strange pale Midwesterner--someone my uncle met at his job, a boy who hailed from Minnesota, a boy who hadn't met any of us before. His family was 1,000 miles away, and my uncle didn't want him to be alone for the holiday, so he asked him to join us.

Shortly after we sat down to dinner, my grandfather started in on his normal holiday routine: he talked about how much he hated black people. In the span of two minutes, he'd used the n-word five times. On Christmas.

This wasn't new. Not at all. My usual policy during these holiday rants was to make long ruts in my mashed potatoes, to busy myself by directing rivers of gravy through these ruts, to try to keep myself from hating my grandfather. But this time I was sitting next to my boyfriend, and I was burning with shame because my my grandfather was saying these things--awful, awful things--in front of him and a complete stranger. It was one thing for him to try to weigh us down with his politics, but to do it in front of strangers was too much. And I was sick of him.

My grandmother said his name once, a reprimand--George!--but that only made him angrier. He continued. He said worse things. My boyfriend had stopped eating his turkey. He had a hand on my knee.

And I knew this was him trying to tell me it was okay, that I shouldn't make a fuss, that I should just keep on eating my potatoes. But I was filled with a sudden rage. Just who did my grandfather think he was? I didn't want to have to sit and listen to him one more second.

So I made my voice steady and calm. I said, "Grandpa? It's Christmas. Please."

The whole table stopped moving. There was silence. Nobody breathed.

My grandfather looked at me as if he'd never seen me before. He stared at me for maybe four seconds, but it felt like eternity. Then he told me he didn't give a damn if it was Christmas. This was his house, I was eating his food, and he was going to say whatever he pleased.

I looked back down at my plate, at my mountain of potatoes, and started eating again. Around the table, breaths expelled. I swallowed gravy and the urge to cry.

An hour later we were gathered in the living room for gift opening. My grandmother's tree burned brightly in the corner. Flutes of champagne glittered in the blush of the multicolored lights. I'd steadily made my way through a pile of gifts I'd gotten: waffle maker, crock pot, DVD player.

I felt a little better, but I should've known it wouldn't last for long. The gift opening continued. Each person had a turn, and we kept circling the living room that way. When the next turn fell on my uncle, he bent to select a gift from his pile. His pants rode up with the bend. His ankles were suddenly visible, and they were outfitted with a bright holiday sock--a sock that was most likely worn to please my grandmother, who hoarded and handed out holiday-themed socks with unparalleled glee.

My grandfather, upon seeing those socks, gasped. "Did you steal those socks off a dead nigger?" he asked. As he said that last word he turned to look directly at me. See? his look said. See? I can say whatever I want, and I don't care what you think about it.

I said nothing. His look was already too smug, and I didn't want to give him more occasion to look that way. I turned to say something to my boyfriend. I leaned up against his knee. I rested there and tried to ignore my grandfather.

This didn't work. The gift opening had passed to my uncle's wife, and she was ripping paper to reveal a set of ivory combs my uncle had gotten for her.

My grandfather raised his voice and stared right at me. "You know what kind of hair that comb wouldn't work with?" he asked. "Nigger hair."

What happened next was ugly. I don't know what happened inside my brain--I don't know what fired or burst into action--but I do know what I felt was something snap. Something unraveled and I lost all control. I was on my feet. "I can't believe you!" I was yelling. "How could you do this? And in front of strangers! My boyfriend! A guest in your home! I asked you nicely! Politely! I said please! It's Christmas!"

That's when my grandfather started thrashing in his armchair. Wrapping paper flew into the air. The chair rocked noisily on its hinges as he struggled to get the footrest down. I thought for a second maybe he was going to come after me. He thrust a finger at me. "You!" he howled. "You are nothing but a spoiled brat! A little know-it-all! Well, you don't know anything! You don't know shit from shit! I am seventy years old, and no little bitch is going to come into my house and tell me what I can and cannot say! Not you, not anyone! I could care less who is visiting! Do you hear me?"

I heard him. I heard him loud and clear, which is surprising because I was crying by that point. It was a hard crying--loud and jagged. He kept yelling, kept saying what an awful girl I was, so spoiled and so inconsiderate, so stupid. But I couldn't hear it all anymore. I was out of the room, running down the hall, running into a bedroom and throwing myself on a pile of coats. I cried in that nest of down and zippers for a few minutes until my boyfriend came after me, told me to put on my coat. He said he wasn't going to sit in a house where people treated people like this. He said, "Come on, we'll go home."

And I was putting on my coat and asking him why my grandfather would do something like that, say those things, treat me that way. I was ready to walk out. But my grandmother appeared in the doorway. My mother, too. They made me sit down. My grandmother told me I had to go back out there and apologize. She said, "He'll never change, Jess. He'll never change, and you have to accept that."

But even back then I knew there was a difference between asking someone to change and asking someone to respect you. If he wanted to go on thinking that way and saying awful things, he could go right ahead and do so. But to deliberately make everyone around him uncomfortable because he thought that was power--and that's what he loved more than anything--that wasn't right. And I wouldn't apologize for asking him to stop. I would never apologize for that.

But my grandmother pleaded. She said I had to, I just had to apologize. I had to be the one to make it right. She wrote me regular letters up until her death, letters that kept begging for an apology from me. He's family, she argued. I wondered what I was. What made me less worthy of receiving an apology?

I didn't apologize. I didn't the night it happened, and I haven't since. My grandfather and I didn't speak until after my grandmother died, and those first few conversations were fueled by guilt. Every conversation after that was fueled by another type of guilt--this one not by death but by my mother. I don't want her to have to deal with it anymore.

And so that is what I was thinking about when I sat in the room with my grandfather, who had started losing his eyesight at noon but hadn't thought to call anyone about it. By the time his girlfriend called for an afternoon chat, he was several hours into a stroke and the doctors couldn't do anything but wait and wait and wait.

I was thinking what a shitty person I was. Here was a man--my own grandfather--who was almost in tears because he couldn't see anything or anyone, and he was saying, "What am I going to do? Oh Jesus Christ, what a thing to have happen. What a thing. How will I live?" And I didn't feel much of anything. I did what everyone did--I put on the good front. I did schtick with my family to take his mind off of it, I told stories, I nodded and said yes, yes, yes when people would say, "It could be worse. It could be worse." I drove to the next hospital after they airlifted him to Buffalo. I stayed late into the night. I went back and forth from his curtain in the emergency room to the waiting room, where my mother and uncle were sleeping. I stayed up with his girlfriend. I waited with him until he went for his MRI. Then I went back to the waiting room and tried to fall asleep, which I couldn't. I stayed at that hospital until 6:00 AM, and then I followed everyone into the parking lot so we could go eat some food, take a shower, get some sleep.

And I did sleep. I slept a lot. I went to bed at 7:30 AM and didn't wake up again until 4:00 PM. I spent the rest of the day wandering through the house like I wasn't quite sure where I was or what had happened or how to feel. I bumped through the next few hours before falling asleep again at 11:00. Sometimes, I guess, it's just easier to sleep than it is to think about things.

He Swears It's Clean

Today I called my brother. I don't often call my brother, mainly because I don't have a reason to. After all, what would we talk about? His possibly-gay-black belt-bunk mate? Hooters waitresses? The pros and cons of a boy ordering a Fuzzy Navel?

But today I bit the bullet. I did it. I called him and said, "Adam, I need to ask you questions."

And he said, "Is this about something bad?"

I assured him it wasn't. It wasn't about anything bad at all.

"Okay then," he said. "Ask away."

"Well," I said, "what I need to ask you about is strip clubs."

"Oh," he said, very seriously, more serious than I've ever heard him. The tone of his voice changed. In one breath he went from assistant head cashier at a tool store to full professor--someone tenured, learned, wise. He could've been lecturing on mitosis or race relations or the brilliance of WB Yeats. But he wasn't. "Well, Jess, what would you like to know?" he asked.

I told him I wanted to know about Canadian strip clubs. I said I needed to know my options. There's a bachelorette party coming up, after all, and I wanted to be well-versed on the whereabouts, general cleanliness, and price ranges of all the clubs close to where we will be staying in Niagara Falls. The party is taking place on the Canadian side of the falls, the same place my nineteenth birthday took place, the same place where we lost one of our college friends for several hours because she went off with some random boy from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania and neglected to tell us she was going. (We will not repeat that same type of raw panic we knew that time, however. Steph, party planner extraordinaire, is on it. "Don't worry," she told me today, "I'm going to have everyone's license plate numbers and contact information. Just in case." This is a good thing. Last time we underestimated Canada and the falls and the strange songs they sing into some girls' heads--songs that make them slip their hand into the hand of a boy wearing a straggly wife beater and a gold chain, songs that take them away from their friends who then wander up and down Clifton Hill and Lundy's Lane for hours, calling their names, screaming You better not be dead! Your dad is going to kill us!)

It's good that the party will be in Canada. After all, in Canada, strippers can be full-on naked and liquor is still served. Served by the boatload. And cheaply, too.

"Top shelf will run you about seven bucks," my brother informed me. "Well drinks, though, you can get them for $4.25... no, excuse me... $4.75."

I asked my brother where to go specifically. He listed several places that are over the border. He told me about the one that's closest to our hotel. "It's clean," he said. "Real clean. I swear. I like it there. They have good food, too, and you get a ton of it."

"What's it like?" I asked him.

He described it: two floors, one long stage, which he referred to as "runway-like," and several smaller stages that have table clusters surrounding them.

"When are you going?" he asked, sounding suspicious. Suddenly I was afraid it was a very real possibility that I would run into my brother while I was at the strip club. I didn't want to see my brother sitting next to a stage with a pile of chicken wings in front of him and a wad of dollar bills in his fist.

"Eeeew," I said. "You're not going to be there when I'm there, are you? That's just gross and wrong."

Luckily, though, my brother is going up before then. They've planned ahead. They're going soon, actually, and he said he is looking forward to it. "You'll like this place," he said. "Seriously, it's clean."

I asked him about the clientele--skanky? businessmen? a mix?--and I asked him about the club's position on girls coming in, especially groups of girls.

"Oh, it's fine," he said. "There's always girls there. They have a lot of fun." He told me this like he needs to convince me, like I need to be convinced that strip clubs are fun. I had the momentary urge to tell him to sit back because I was going to tell him my top three best strip club stories, and one of them involved me running into a stripper in the bathroom, a stripper who had her leg hoisted up on the counter as to better facilitate her checking the status of her lady parts. I squelched the urge to tell him this, though. I think he and I operate on the same basic principal, and that principal is I Don't Want to Know, Okay?

My brother continued talking about the girl patrons. "We've been noticing something lately," he said. "Lots of guys are bringing their girlfriends. They're always there."

Then there was more squelching on my part. This time because I wanted to tell him about the time I made the Wily Republican take me to a strip club in Minneapolis--all-nude, a place that served giant cups of pop or fruit juice. I wanted to tell my brother that the whole thing was sensory overload and I felt like I should have brought a notebook or a laptop so I could accurately capture all that I was seeing: guys and girls who'd left their prom early to finish the night by fanning singles up at willowy Swedish strippers, the big screen TV set off to the side of the stage that was broadcasting the Discovery Network--a show about ants or earthquakes or maybe it was ants in earthquakes, and that stripper wearing a plaid skirt-knee-high combo I'd owned in eighth grade. But, again, I said nothing.

My brother went on for a few more minutes. He had other options for me. Go here, do this, see this. Don't go here, don't do this, don't see this. He told me to stick to his favorite place. It's close, he said. It's good. It's fun. And it's clean. He couldn't stress that enough. It made me wonder what other strip clubs he's been in, if he's seen some things I never want to see, if he's come out wanting to shower and get a tetanus shot as fast as he could drive back to the states.

I thanked my brother. He'd been helpful. And, really, I had never heard him that eager to talk to me. He'd never sounded more pleased to have been consulted on something. I might have made his night.

"This is good," I said. "I'll start researching this. I'll let you know what we decide."

We said goodbye then, and I knew he would hang up the phone and crack his knuckles or stretch his arms up over his head--some gesture of self-satisfaction, something that said, "My God, I am so freaking smart. I am an expert."

And he sort of is.

Go, Abe, Go.

This was our Friday night:

Happy hour two-for-ones:



Happy hour buffet:



A special appearance of Sporty Amy:



Game Five, which caused me to announce to the whole bar that the man who just made that save, that man right there, he is my love, my future husband, and I love his hair:



Getting Abe dressed for the next round of the playoffs:

Further Proof That He's Literary

When I got the news yesterday that my latest story was going to be published I couldn't help but thinking, Huh. That's interesting.

I thought it was interesting because it's one of those stories that was fueled by the Wily Republican--things he did, things he said, things he was. I wrote the story the week after I moved away from Minnesota and back to New York. It wasn't the greatest week I ever had, and it's important to remember that I spent most of that week pantsless and wandering around my childhood home thinking Oh my God oh my God oh my God. My mood was foul. My hygiene was questionable. My head was a mess. And when I sat down in front of the computer all I could think about was what I'd left behind, and the Wily Republican was one of those things.

While he was in college, the Wily worked at the nearby psychiatric treatment center, where the state threw the most despicable people it could dig up. He told me so many stories. There was a man who committed a string of rapes by first hitting women joggers with his car, knocking them down, taking away their only means of escape--their fast legs--and then he would get out, drag them off the beaten path and finish what he'd come to do. Another man was locked away because he'd kept his wife locked in a closet for days without food and water. Shortly after his arrival at the treatment center, he was beaten within an inch of his life by someone who had fashioned a heavy whip out of an old sock stuffed with batteries.

The Wily often looked tired when he told me these stories, and I wasn't sure how he--or anyone--did it, how they kept going back to a place like that without snapping, without taking these people up in their own hands and taking them apart little by little. Snapping bones, tearing out hair, snipping off fingertips.

So I wrote that. I wrote all of that. And I made the main character fall in love, a hard love that, when held up next to his life and work, made the people he watched over seem even more repulsive than they already were.

I like the story quite a bit, so I was happy to see it get picked up--especially because it got picked up by the first place I sent it to, and that's something that hasn't happened to me before. But what was more interesting to me was this: that's the second Wily Republican piece to go. Sometimes I think he and I lived our strange intersecting lives for three years just so he could feed me inspiration, just so we could run around town and do strange things that would eventually turn up in my writing. Sometimes I think the WR is a lucky charm. Sometimes I think that's worth all the times he made me cry, all the ways he made me crazy.

In the story that just got taken, there's a line the main character thinks the first time he sees his to-be-wife. He's looking and looking and looking at her. He can't stop. He doesn't know what it is exactly, but there's just something about her that takes away his ability to talk, breathe, move. He keeps on staring and thinks, Now that's someone worth knowing. That's one of my favorite lines of the story, mostly because I like to think that's what the Wily thought when he was first getting to know me. That he was watching me be quirky-strange-bumbling me and thinking, This is someone I'd like to know for a long time. I like to think this because I know that during those first few months we knew each other I kept looking at him and listening to him tell his stories, and I couldn't help thinking with almost complete certainty that this was going to be trouble, trouble, trouble, but I was going to go along with it anyway because it felt like it was going to be really good, really worth it, one of those things that would change the way I looked at the world.

Best. Day. Ever.

I'll tell you this: it hasn't been easy lately. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that I am not going to land any of the fifty full-time teaching gigs I applied for this year. I'm starting to realize that, for better or worse, I am probably going to be in Buffalo for another year. Still, I remain thankful for what I've been given: more time with my family and oldest friends.

But it's been hard. It's been hard to go to the mailbox every single day and see more rejection letters from colleges that stretch from New Hampshire to Oregon. We don't want you, they say. Are you kidding, they say. Better luck next year, they say.

It's been a similarly taxing battle for publication lately. My stories--even the one I love and believe in more than anything--have bounced back to me. Rejections have sprinkled in from all my favorite literary magazines. Not right, they say. We loved almost all of it, they say. Try us again, they say.

My mailbox has been stuffed full of no, no, no, no, no. It's been like this for months. And it was starting to grate on my insides, scrub me raw.

But then this morning I woke up in a beautiful mood. There was some song on the radio--some song I'd never heard before--and it was just the right song to wake up to. I wanted to sing in the shower. I wanted to pull out some of my best dance moves as I was pouring cereal. I wanted to splash through leftover puddles on my walk into school this morning. Everything felt good.

It was just one of those days, filled with these and other beautiful things:

1. I got a standing ovation in my last class of the afternoon.

2. My boy Blake--my favorite American Idol contestant, the boy who, yesterday, inspired me to shriek (in front of my father nonetheless) I want to bite his stomach!--was sent safely back to the couch and Sanjaya was kicked off the show. Later, Katy would call me to declare victory and say, "The world is now right!" and yes, yes, I had to agree. It was. Now I will no longer have to worry about writing her a five paragraph rant on Wednesday mornings that discusses how much I am bothered by Sangina, which is what I took to calling him weeks ago. (When I said Sangina in front of my mother, she turned to me and said, very seriously, "Jess, that's not his name." And I had to say, "I know, mother. I'm combining words here." And there was a pause and a smile as it slowly dawned on her. "Oh," she said. "Ohhhhh. I like it!")

3. The Sabres won Game Four. Let's take a moment to meditate on the beauty of this statement.

4. And here's the crowning moment of it all: all the ugly no-no-no was finally replaced by one yes--a yes that made me drive to the liquor store in search of a bottle of champagne because why shouldn't one celebrate success on a Wednesday night? One of my stories was just picked up by the Berkeley Fiction Review. The edition should be out in a few weeks.

Anticipating the Separation Anxiety

There are two weeks left. Two tiny, eensy, infinitesimal weeks left before the spring semester is over. There is a part of me that is saying yesss and halleluiah and bring me a mojito! but that part is seriously being dwarfed by the fact that in two weeks I will no longer take the elevator up to the top floor of the English building and walk into the room that's made of windows-windows-windows to see the beaming faces of all my best and favorite boys.

There are ten best and favorite boys (and, actually, one girl). They are engineering students. They are going to grow up to build important things. They are going to keep our world turning. But before they do that, they are going to make it through two sections of English Composition (regular and advanced) and they are going to do it with me. They enjoyed my class so much last semester that they swarmed my open sections for this semester and, even though they hate writing and English, and even though they think it's terribly pointless for boys like themselves, they have spent the last thirteen weeks of class (and the fifteen weeks of fall semester, too) listening to me, getting better, trying to impress me, tossing papers at me with confidence. "That's the best paper I've ever written," they'll say, or, "You're going to love this." And they're right. It is and I do. They are trying so hard, and I love them for it.

These best boys have done a lot of things for me. They've brought me peanut butter pie, Oreos, and ice cream. They've written me notes of love. They've even gone so far as to orchestrate it so their laptops blast bass-thumping arena rock-type songs when I enter the classroom, which makes me feel like I'm some sort of badass superhero teacher.

It's things like this that make me adore them, and I adore them in a way that is unyielding, hard, unshakable. Part of me wants to scoop them all up and move them into my basement so that they are available whenever I get the itch to be amused. Part of me wants to tell them that when they've all successfully turned twenty-one, I am going to take them to the bar and buy them rounds and rounds of shots. Part of me just wants to stop time so I can go on with them in my class forever.

After this semester, they are done with English. They will have successfully killed their general education requirements, and they will be off to save the world with their chemical-mechanical-aerospace engineering skills. I will miss them terribly. So, so terribly.

I'm dreading the last day. I'm dreading the handing out of cookies (they asked, they begged, they looked at me with big big big eyes and said, Can't you make us cookies again? Like last semester? They were soooo good.) and the inevitable goodbye, which is going to be as difficult as saying goodbye to my first-ever class. It will be so much the same. It will be me looking at these boys--my best, best boys--and thinking, You have changed me, you have made me a better teacher, you have taught me about myself. I will never be the same again.

And it will be completely true.