🎧 Chapter Three | Moody Women Staring into the Distance
What you need to know:
Midway on a journey to a hot springs, the wheels nearly fall off the family car. Jennifer, her kids and her new husband could have all died. Turns out the new husband forgot to tighten the lug nuts down earlier that week prior but will not admit making the error. Rather he calls it “one of those things.” After fixing the wheels, Jennifer struggles. Her husband is the best of men. A doctor. A teacher. He is smart, kind, and good but is he? Is he really? She takes her dilemma to her dearest friend…
Chapter Three
Moody Women Staring into the Distance
A week later, I sit at the head of an antique dining table, mechanical pencil in hand and bend over a stack of pages.
At my side, Fran, my co-teacher.
Around the table, several middle-aged women of varying creative-writing ability.
Everyone in this room, including Fran, writes a novel or a memoir with an ambition to get published one day.
I am their teacher.
At the opposite end of the table a woman reads her sample aloud. Her day job is as a Nike executive but she decided to learn creative writing after discovering her husband cheated for twenty-three years.
“In the end, I suspect my husband cheated as an expression of American patriarchy,” she reads. “It’s White entitlement on a rampage. White men annihilated the Native population and now, because there’s no one else to destroy, they decimate their own families. Honor is a relic of the past…”
On and on she goes. The work primarily an emotional diatribe. Totally understandable, I think, while underlining patriarchy, entitlement, annihilated, decimate.
Finally done, Nike slides her pages away from herself, eyes darting from me to the others. High color on her cheeks.
It’s the rule that no one speaks for a couple minutes. Rather we all allow time to make a few notes and gather our thoughts
The space for the workshop, which meets every week, is in the main suite in an old house converted to offices. It’s appointed with earth-toned throw rugs. Antique lamps topped with jeweled shades. Side tables. Bookcases. A bay window draped in velvet curtains.
I cut a quick glance toward Fran who is a tiny slip of a woman with shoulder length dark hair that curls softly at her rounded shoulders. Gold flecked brown eyes. With a gamine face, she is playful, fiery, confident. Catching me looking her way, Fran lifts her fine brows slightly as if asking: “How are you going to deal with this one?”
Turning to the group, I flip to the first page of Nike’s submission. “Let’s comb through the positives of this piece first,” I say in my best teaching voice. Calm. Professional. Focused. “There a lot of passion here. A lot of certainty and conviction. For instance…”
The rest of the writers lean over their own copies of the pages and write fast notes.
My primary teaching credential is being a New York Times bestseller with three memoirs published in the US and abroad but I am also in the midst of wrapping an MFA in creative writing. Once I graduate, I plan to apply for a university position. Until then, the casual workshop model allows me the flexibility to be available for the kids while also bringing in income enough to pay my (and their) share of the bills.
“Fran, what are some of the positive things you’re seeing in this work?” I ask.
Fran, a handful of years older than me, already has an MFA and once taught English in a junior college.
“I like the verbs she’s uses,” Fran says. “They are strong, vibrant, active. For instance…”
Three hours pass in this way. The various writers read aloud and Fran and I make our mostly positive comments followed by a few gentle suggestions about holding back on stronger emotions (and words like annihilated, decimate) and remaining in scene. Soon, the class ends and the writers file out the door.
“Every single week,” Fran says, closing the door after the last is gone. “You are so positive. How is that even possible?”
I gather wayward pens, toss them into a cup in the center of the table. Collect the left behind handouts. “Are you staying for tea?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says, eases each chair into place.
Fran’s bursting with style in a pair of slouchy Italian leather boots, jeans, and a black cashmere sweater-shawl cardigan with long tails that drape “scarf-like” over one shoulder. She unwraps and re-wraps her sweater and sits in the chair at the head of the table. A born teacher. A born leader.
I press the on button for the hot pot, carry over a basket of teas and two mugs. “I was that bad once,” I say. “You were, too.”
The water churns into a boil. Snaps off.
I cross the room, grab the pot.
“Ha,” Fran says, flicking through the tea selection. “I was never that bad of a writer. Or if I was, I would certainly not read my work out loud to total strangers.”
“That’s kind of the whole point,” I say, pour water into her mug and my own. Steam lifts, twists, vanishes.
Fran unwraps mint for me, drops a spice blend in her own cup.
I set the hot pot aside, taking the chair where she had been sitting during class. I don’t care. I’m better at blending behind the scenes.
I dunk my tea bag, the water goes from clear to dark brown. “I think something’s wrong,” I say.
Fran takes up her mug and sips. “With the kids?” she asks.
“With Rick,” I say, detail everything that happened. “He’s like, ‘ho-hum, whatever.’ He never said he was sorry or accepted he made a mistake. It’s kind of freaking me out.”
“Typical man,” Fran says. “They can be such babies.”
I pat-pat the table between us, the hard metal of my wedding ring against the wood. Made of an antique gold, the ring is elegant, expensive, and rather ominous now with its black faceted diamond that I thought was unique months earlier.
“I don’t think it’s pride,” I say. “I think something is off here.”
Fran lowers her cup to the table. “What?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, looking past her at the wall of framed paintings of moody-looking women staring off in the distance: One a windswept woman holding to a fly away scarf, another of two dancers wearing black tights and red peasant skirts collapsed in exhaustion, the third of a corseted Victorian in a long skirted white dress who shades her eyes as she gazes into the distance.
The Victorian by Frank Benson is my favorite. The young woman was his eldest daughter, Eleanor, and considered the embodiment of the ideal feminine.
“I don’t know,” I say, looking at Fran again. “I can’t name it. It is him? It is me? It is us?”
Fran traces her finger around the rim of the cup, “You think you guys might need some counseling?”
“So soon?” I ask.
Fran unwraps the tail of her sweater, re-wraps. “Not that soon. I mean, it is your third marriage and his second,” she says, then raises a hand quickly. “No judgement. That’s not what I’m saying. When I married again, problems bubbled to the surface faster than in my first. Frank and I did counseling for a while.”
“Did it help?” I ask.
“We’re still married,” Fran said, takes up her cup and sits back in her chair again.
“Okay,” I say, sit back in my own chair and cross my arms. Tea forgotten, I take inventory:
My first marriage—four years long—ended when I was twenty-three. We did not do therapy.
My second marriage—eleven years long—ended just after Josephine was born. I was thirty-eight. We did therapy but not much and again, my marriage ended.
After the second and before Rick, I took a long hiatus from men and I devoted myself to the kids, to writing, and to spiritual practice with a Tibetan master.
Then I met Rick. The perfect man. After a couple years of dating, we married last fall at the Rose Garden. Fran, my witness. Her husband Frank, Rick’s witness.
A gentle thud on the table, Fran setting her cup down. “I better get home,” she says, peering at her wrist watch. “We’ve got company coming tonight.”
“Oh. Right. Of course. Sorry to keep you so late,” I say. Embarrassed for burdening her with my issues. Sitting up, I take her cup and my own untouched tea. Stand.
Fran is up too, crosses to the door and unhooks her jacket, which she tugs on.
“Do you know anyone?” I ask, standing there with the cups in my hands. “I mean, do you have a recommendation of who we might see?”
“I might,” she says, looping her purse over her shoulder. “Let me think about it and I’ll send you a few names.”
“Good. Thanks,” I say.
“Try not to worry,” she says. “This is probably just a blip.” Fran opens the door and is gone.
Alone in my office, I stand there like a waitress who just bussed a table. A blip, she said. Just a blip.
Next:
Chapter 4: The Yarn Garden: Jennifer takes up a new hobby to help deal with the stress of a marriage on the rocks after only four months. Then meets this husband with the hope to convince him they need some help…
