TRUE STORY, PART TWO

Got a hankerin' to read part one? Go here: 

PART ONE

PART TWO

Debbie and I continued our lunchtime smoke breaks under the carport. I was surprised to find that a junior high school that beat the crap out of you with a special paddle if you were caught chewing gum didn't seem to care if you left campus at noon. We weren't the only ones wandering away, and the exodus was no secret.  Nobody seemed to care what we did as long as we didn't do it on school property. High school guys would pull up in front and wait for their younger girlfriends to run down the sidewalk and jump in the car. And speaking of cars. Debbie sometimes drove herself to school even though she was way too young to have a license. On those days we didn't smoke under the carport. Instead, we cruised the strip, cruised the high school, and cruised the other junior high across town while we smoked our Marlboros and drank whiskey from the fifth Debbie kept under the seat. I was thirteen.

Debbie must have finally thought it was time to take our friendship to the next level because she asked me to stay the night.

"We can ride horses on Saturday. "

 Horses? Her aunt and uncle must have been rich, and they must have let her run wild because she wasn't their kid and they were just giving her a place to sleep until her mother came home from Paris. I was almost jealous.

After school Debbie drove me to her house.  Down dusty New Mexico roads that never seemed to stop. Over flat land that stretched out forever.  After twenty miles I finally spotted a mailbox that marked another dusty lane, this one with a house at the end.

 I immediately understood that her aunt and uncle were poor. Really, really poor. The house was this sad bunch of squares sitting on top of dirt. There was the main square made of plywood and stuff that had probably come from other houses. Nothing fit, but the building did have windows and a roof and some paint here and there.  The biggest square must have been the start of the home, and then as time went on other rooms were added, all with salvaged wood and mismatched windows. Inside it was clean, with nothing but a kitchen table and chairs, and off in one corner a couch and television.  Debbie said hi to a woman standing at the stove frying chicken in a cast-iron skillet.

The woman turned and gave me a smile. She had very few teeth, her skin was like leather, and her hair was a wild tangle around her head. Debbie's grandmother? Great grandmother?

One of the additions to the house turned out to be Debbie's room, and we headed straight for it, shut the door, and settled on the bed with a scrapbook.

 "There's my mom." She pointed to an elegant woman standing next to a fancy car.  She was so pretty. Like a movie star. Did she pay the aunt and uncle to take care of Debbie? I'll bet she did.

"Is that your grandmother out there?" I whispered.

Debbie laughed. "It's my aunt.  Isn't she something?"

"She looks so old."

"She's in her forties."

A door slammed and the aunt shouted that it was time to eat.

We sat down. Four of us now, because Debbie's uncle had arrived from the oil refinery.  He didn't look nearly as old at the woman, and he had all his teeth.

 Green Formica table. Aunt and uncle at opposite ends. Debbie and I across from each other. Fried chicken. Baked beans. Potato salad.

I got the feeling this wasn't their normal meal, that they'd prepared it because of company. I felt honored.  We passed bowls of food in silence. Ate in silence.  Struggling to come up with a topic of conversation, I finally looked across the Formica to my friend and asked, "When's your mom coming back from Paris?"

Debbie froze.

The aunt and uncle froze.

What had I done? What had I said?  Maybe the mom wasn't coming back. Maybe she'd left Debbie here forever.

The uncle finally spoke. "Your mother?" he asked Debbie.

She said nothing.

"Your mother in Paris?"

Debbie still wasn't talking, so I tried to smooth things over. "Debbie told me about how her mother is living in Paris, and how she's staying here with you two for a while."

The aunt and uncle looked at each other, then burst out laughing. The guy tossed back his head and roared. The woman joined in with her toothlessness.

Debbie threw her chicken leg on her plate and ran to her room, slamming the door.

Which left the three of us. The aunt finally stopped laughing. When the uncle could finally talk, he said, "That's what she told you?  That we're her aunt and uncle?" He burst out laughing again.

I finally got it. They were Debbie's parents.  I felt so stupid. None of her story had made any sense. None of it.

Later Debbie unlocked the door and I joined her in the bedroom. She'd been crying. "I'll bet they told you they're my parents, didn't they?" she said. "Well, they aren't. They're a couple of liars."

This was the new story she'd concocted while I sat at the table.  I actually liked her parents. Liked the way they hadn't gotten mad. "You are the liar," I said.

If I'd been older I might have been more sympathetic. I would have tried to figure out why she'd done what she'd done. Invented a mother because she was ashamed of her own. Invented a life because she was ashamed of the one she had.

Instead, I never talked to Debbie again. I never forgave her. Occasionally I'd spot her in the hall, but she always looked away. And I'd wonder if she was waiting for a new kid to come along so she could tell her about the mother who lived in Paris.

* * *

 Author note: I'm fuzzy on how we got from school to her house.  We might have taken the school bus, or she might have driven. In the sixties in New Mexico it wasn't unusual for kids to drive even if they didn't have a license. Especially farm kids who came to town from as far as eighty miles away.  

TRUE STORY

Let's just call her Debbie. We met on my first day at the new school. Mom had remarried and we'd moved from the city of Albuquerque to a small desert town in southern New Mexico. Way beyond where the sidewalk ends. Eighth grade. Girls dressed like the past, talking with strong accents.

When you start a new school in the middle of the year, you have to be careful of the kids who latch onto you. I knew the drill. Don't be too friendly. Don't let them talk you into a visit.  But Debbie seemed different. Not desperate, and other kids didn't avoid her.  She was kind of cool in a tough cowgirl way.  At noon, when boys and girls stood in the lobby drinking pop and eating candy bars, she crooked her finger at me and tipped her head toward the door. I went, curious, glad to get away from the stares.

 With shoulders hunched and her gate rolling—all of this accomplished in a print dress, oxfords, and white knee socks—she strode past the flagpole with deliberate intent. I followed.

We crossed the street to a beige ranch-style house with a For Sale sign and carport. The place was empty, windows smeared and a yard full of pale dirt and dead grass. Hidden from the school, Debbie produced a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of her jean jacket and we lit up. She told me how she wasn't from there, and how she hated the one-horse town. Her mother was an artist studying in Paris for a year, and Debbie had been sent to live with her aunt and uncle. She hated them too. "Dumb, drunk rednecks."  It was nice to know another outsider.

But I was feeling queasy.

Back in the school, Debbie showed me where the science class was located, then, like a weary bronc rider,  she lumbered down the hall.

Slinking into a seat near the door, I burped and a puff of smoke came out of my mouth.

To be continued…

THE ART OF ABSENCE

I've been doing a fair amount of guest speaking lately. Since it's mostly for The Orchard, the art of memoir writing comes up again and again.  I meet people who are working on their memoirs, and one thing I like to share is how surprised I was to find that through writing about my own life I came to a much deeper understanding of things I thought I understood through and through. I think the biggest surprise was finding out how much my father's abandonment impacted me, my mother, and my older brother.  At the time, we all put on a brave face.  We weren't crybabies.  We didn't feel sorry for ourselves. Good riddance, you jerk.  Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. You are dead to us. You aren't worthy of us.

 But until I wrote the memoir, I didn't understand how my father's actions turned all of us into different people. Forever.

I can now see how that single action rerouted the course of our lives in a damaging way. We'd been strong rivers, moving in a solid direction toward the ocean. Now we were trickling streams, trying to find our way across a desert that led nowhere.  His leaving forever changed us. Changed who we were. Changed our core and changed our hearts, making us bitter, jaded children. And once he left, the very act of his bold and crazy move made him bigger than life to me; made him some strange folk hero.

With his leaving, the focus of our lives shifted. Before, it had been about school, home, family. Now it was about absence, rejection, abandonment, and the daily struggles of extreme poverty.

His absence sculpted us. My mother, my older brother, and me. Cutting away clay to create these new people who looked at the world with bitter, wounded eyes.  This is what I didn't realize until I wrote my second memoir.

When I was working on The Man Who Left, I sent the typical proposal to my agent. Three chapters and a synopsis. She liked the material, but she thought it needed a stronger story arc.  We were in agreement about that, and I'd been struggling to find a solid theme. She saw two possible choices that would help make the book feel bigger. One was for me to move to Florida to care for my father, and the other choice was to work in an Alzheimer's care facility.  I understood where she was coming from, but I had no interest in doing either. I finished the book, but she never read it and it wasn't submitted anywhere. Instead, I published it under Belfry Press.  I've been surprised by the positive reader response even though the story still feels a bit incomplete to me.  And many people have asked me to write a third memoir, but I don't know about that.  Maybe someday, but right now I'm anxious to get back into fiction.

And just because I love this photo...

TWO WAYS TO WIN AN ARC OF THE ORCHARD

You'll find a lot of cool things at Brenda Novak's Annual Auction for the Cure of Diabetes.

Like full manuscript evaluations from agents, vacations, dinner with writers, shopping trips, cruises, and a lot of books.

Brenda Novak's annual auction

I used to ask people to leave a comment in order to enter a drawing. I would actually write down the names and put them in a bowl, but Goodreads has this handy little thing that does it all for you.

The only drawback is that it tries to match readers with books. That's good for a writer, but maybe not so good for people who read my blog because you will be competing against many people who've probably never heard of me and might not even care that much about winning a book. But I thought I'd give it a try.

GOODREADS BOOK GIVEAWAY

IT'S WHAT'S INSIDE THAT COUNTS

I'm posting about memoir writing, but most of what I say can be applied to fiction. The one thing I really noticed about memoir is that much of it is internal. You write the scene, then you DIG DIG DIG. DEEP. You find yourself in that scene, and you react and analyze the events that unfold. So, on the surface, you might have a scene that's not that exciting -- until you put yourself in it, and by that I mean let us know what you think about the events. Let us feel the emotion of the scene. And yes, this applies to fiction. This seems to be one of the last things writers learn to do: let their characters process the event, feel the event. And yet this is an important layer when you're creating a piece of art. Emotion.