sketch of abby by eileen liebman

Laurie and I returned home from our book tour on Sunday, she to Vermont and me to Wisconsin, where the ice on Lake Winnebago, which was solid when I left town a week ago is now black and honeycombed, mushy with snowpack and debris, and flecked with small thawed spots large enough for maybe one duck to swim in. The lake looks how I feel, or rather it looks how a certain essay will feel when I set out to try to revise it; a vast stretch of pocked, uncertainly thawing, no longer safely traversable ice. One step at a time I’ll fall through or slide, then climb out bruised and shivering, my coat torn from where the dog leapt in to save me. The dog knows it’s been too long since I’ve written anything but emails having to do with 1, being part of a three judge panel for the Pen Faulker Award in fiction this year, and 2, my and Laurie’s book tour. Have I minded this hiatus from creative work? Not a bit. But last week we named our five Faulkner finalists, and though I’d hoped to stride right into writing again once the book tour was over, the essay I put aside in August isn’t ready, it seems, to be looked at yet. For one thing, I can’t find it, can’t remember for the life of me by what name I filed it. Spider Bite? No. Spiderbite, then? I try a few variations like essay spider bite, first with no comma, then with, until finally I find it by just surfing around. It’s named: essay, through forest strewn with flowers we come home our hearts melting our teeth made of thorns.

Huh, I ask? What does that have to do with a spider bite? I’m afraid to click it open, afraid to start reading. I did once fall through the ice, while rescuing the dog after some early season ice shoves had settled into an illusion of walkable, goose-chasable water. Does my essay care to drown, or does it hope to go on living? With a hesitant click, I discover a list of notes on top:

• invasive carcinoma of left breast
• graves disease
• history of hemiparesis
• small bowel obstruction
• DVT (deep vein thrombosis)
• leiomyoma of uterus

What, I ask, is a leiomyoma? I scroll further down in hopes some line will send me into the zone I was in when I wrote it, and when that doesn’t happen I go downstairs to the kitchen, open the fridge, grab the ginger root that, bitch as I am, I’m shocked Chuck remembered to buy for me, peel it, lay it on a cutting board and thwack it with a mallet. Soon there’s only a pile of yellow fiber out of which it appears an immensely fragrant shawl might be woven, but since I don’t know how to weave, I throw it into a pot to boil for hours, as I was told by the waitress at Spice Saigon while on book tour in New York is essential if you want the perfect tea, a tea so bracing it might reveal to me the reason for the spider bite essay’s continued presence on this earth. Meanwhile there’s a knock at the door (somebody needing to pick up Chuck’s truck) and then a review of A Well-Made Bed appears on Shelf Awareness (“Framed like a classic hypothetical question, the novel explores how seemingly simple people can be swept up in dangerous schemes.”) It’s a good review but of the sort from which it’s difficult to pull a quote without changing the order of some of the words, which Laurie won’t allow. While she and I are chatting I remember it wasn’t a spider bite that prompted the essay at all, but a non-existent bat bite that had me driving to the emergency room at two in the morning in order for me to displace my terror of breast cancer, which when I was diagnosed with it six years earlier hadn’t scared me in the least, and never did, and still doesn’t.

Feeling hopeful about this I get off the phone with Laurie and read further down, past the part where the doctor, the nurses, and even the check-in clerk, who looked like the character Abby Sciuto, Chief Forensic Scientist on NCIS, tried to hide their suspicion that I was a hypochondriac even though all the ailments listed at the top of the essay actually DID happen to me, as they could see very well in my medical files. But no, I admitted, I had seen no bat. And no, I admitted, I had felt no bite. The doctor said the tooth marks looked like any old scrape and to go home and get some rest since it was 4 AM, which meant I had to walk back out and drive home through the roundabouts.

The roundabouts, I see, feature in the essay as a symbol of headstrong confusion or something. Still, why did I name it through forest strewn with flowers we come home our hearts melting our teeth made of thorns?

At which point I recall the whole truth of the thing, and then I sit here in a panic supposing I might have to actually write it. Chuck and I had had one of our terrible fights that evening before I drove myself to the emergency room, and though we don’t, and won’t ever, harm each other physically, we do harm each other, badly, emotionally. My essay wasn’t about a bat bite filling in for breast cancer so I would finally be afraid of it. Rather it was about–but can I even say it here?–a bat bite filling in for the fights I have with Chuck and all the bites that come with them. I was doing what they call “seeking help” that night, help for me and help for him and help for both of us together…and then I drove home without getting any. It wasn’t breast cancer or bats I was finally afraid of, but me and him and our name callings, our brawls, our bellowings.

I don’t know if I ever will write that essay, although I do love the title–which I all at once remember is a modified line from an old Tamil love poem–because our teeth are made of thorns. At last I go downstairs to my pot of boiling ginger and taste a spoonful. It tastes nothing like the tea I loved so much at Spice Saigon. Instead it tastes like pepper water. Of course it hasn’t been boiling for nearly as long as the waitress insisted, so I cover it back up again and sit at my desk to wait.

NOTE: The title of the essay (through forest strewn etc) is a modified version of an old Tamil love poem, “Nine on a Happy Reunion,” translated by A. K. Ramanujan, A K. Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• I was one of a 3-judge panel for the Pen Faulkner award for fiction this past half year, so I will say that the best five books I’ve read this year are our five finalists, which were announced last week. 

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• If you are stuck in interiority, force something into the piece from the outside, like a knock on the door or a speeding car or a lost child…and if you are stuck in exteriority, stop for a minute to let your character think and feel and just BE, for a while.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I can’t stay seated at my desk for longer than say, twenty minutes at a time. I’m a jack in-the-box. Along with this propensity for motion comes the fact that when I am finally lying motionless in bed at night, falling asleep, and the solution to some writing puzzle comes to me, my body moves involuntarily; without thinking about it I flip right over.

~

By Abby Frucht:

*

x

n

m

—Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

April 1, 2016: Abby Frucht

In 1967 I was riding bikes, and while waiting for my friend to catch up, I opened the mailbox I was leaning against whose little red flag was up. But there was no letter inside. Come on, I yelled to my friend. I have an idea. For weeks afterwards, we alternated writing chapters of The Mystery of the Missing Letter that our fourth grade buddies were eventually able to check out of our classroom as if it were a real book.

In 2010 Abby Frucht, one of my workshop leaders at VCFA, read a newspaper article about old people with dementia who wandered. As she wrote on Caroline Leavitt‘s blog, “I thought of a daughter following around her dad who was wandering and learning things about his and her past, and what haunted me was the idea of him leading her toward evidence of wrongs he had done, wrongs in which she herself was in a way complicit.” Then Abby phoned a friend–Laurie Alberts, also a member of the faculty at VCFA but who lives on the other side of the country. I’m not sure if they alternated writing all the chapters, but they did alternate writing the first two, early versions of which you can read at Numero Cinq, the first chapter written by Abby with Laurie’s advice and editorial input, the second by Laurie with Abby’s advice and editorial input.

The result of their collaboration is the novel A Well-Made Bed, which was recently published by Red Hen Press. It is a wild ride on roller-coaster sentences. Take a look at these:

After making this embarrassing admission, Jaycee toyed with the idea of pretending to need to go to the bathroom and finding an empty seat in the rear of the plane, maybe next to the screaming baby or the deaf man she’d stood near in line, since what was the point of having your first adventure if all you did was talk about the life you’d left behind? Since this trip really was her first adventure, marking her first time away from Hillwinds and her parents, she really didn’t know if having an adventure meant you kept jumping from one place to another whenever you felt like it or bore things out a while to see what became of you wherever chance put you.

She’d told them only she was taking the bus to Burlington to attend a costume making class, and then she really did go to a costume shop and purchased a bonnet so as not to have been lying, but after that she got a cab to the airport and ate oatmeal at the friendly little diner-type place overlooking the runways, which was what her parents would want her to eat, especially since she was buying it on their debit card.

Add Noor to the story and you have the “Thelma and Louise of the 21st century.” If you like plot, you’ll love the ups and downs of these two. And on top of the reading pleasure, it’s a fascinating look at process. You can compare the early chapters at Numero Cinq with the published versions, and you can read some of Abby and Laurie’s emails back and forth during the writing of the book.

Switching gears for a minute but still speaking of reading pleasure, I highly recommend an essay Abby wrote in 2014,”Abominable.” Here are two excerpts I bet will send you right over to Numero Cinq to read the whole thing.

The younger sister never saw the abominable snowman, since instead of trekking out to the potato fields with the other kids that day, she stayed behind to sit on the curbside and cry, pretending to be a lonely girl who had no friends, not even a sister, which was her favorite thing to do before she learned how to read. 

When the girl who liked to sit on the curbside and cry before she learned how to read turned fifty six, she phoned the older sister to ask if it was true she had seen the abominable snowman or had she only been toying with the younger sister, like playing her as if she were a xylophone by banging the wooden mallet on the crown of her head or hiding her dirty socks in the babysitter’s pocketbook.

Abby has written seven other books–a first novel I have a soft spot for, as well as other novels and story collections. On her website she writes a little bit about each of her books and not just a New York Times summary but some interesting tidbit about writing the book. This is the way she describes that first novel Snap:

This was my first novel, a look at six people, many of them strangers to each other, whose paths cross during the separation and rejuvenation of a marriage. The world of SNAP is skewed, oddball, surreal, and I remember that to write it felt playful and strange, as if I had entered an intricate hall of mirrors.

*NOTE FROM ABBY: We didn’t actually alternate on a chapter basis, rather we each took one of the principal characters, shared the other characters, and edited and revised ALL of it so much that we no longer know who wrote what. You can read more about our collaborative process and other aspects of a well/made bed at our website.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how ABBY FRUCHT spends her days.