Category — News/Updates

This story was recently published in Alaska Quarterly Review’s 30th Anniversary Issue, Spring/Summer 2012.

Big Enough For Slaughter

Alaska Quarterly Review

My father-in-law bought two calves for the baby. He won’t name them, which I think is a bad sign.

They are black and white bulls that he bought for thirty dollars a piece. The dairy sells off the males and retains the females for milking in the spring. He keeps them in the barn behind the house. He closed them in with fencing made from electric wire.

I used to try to make my husband go out there with me, alone, when we first got married. I thought the barn was incredibly sexy. But he didn’t like it and we never did anything in there. He prefers a proper bed or not at all.

The calves drink their milk in the barn. They drink out of galvanized buckets with rubber nipples and bright, cheery labels: Calf-Teria. Steam rises from the buckets. The baby plays in the hay.

“Show her the milk parlor,” my father-in-law says.

My husband shows me the milk parlor in the back of the barn. I was thinking of an ice cream parlor but this is a windowless stall with built-in levels that zigzag up the wall. It is dark and dirty with a drain in the floor crusted with rust. It’s where my mother-in-law used to milk the goats.

“I was beautiful when he met me,” my mother-in-law tells me whenever she comes to visit. They are divorced now. “But then he worked me to death.” Her face is carved with lines and looks like a side of a suitcase that’s been left out in the sun.

“This is Triangle Head,” my father-in-law says. “And that is Square Head.” He pets the heads of the calves while they nurse. They are bull headed and big eyed. Their eyes bulge, gelatinous and nervous. They make a steady, rhythmic clicking sound as they nurse from the Calf-Teria buckets. The baby throws the hay. He tries to grab one of the calves by the eyeball. The calves nurse: click, click, click.

“Aren’t you too old for this?” I ask. My father-in-law is eighty-three and pigeon-toed, lurching across the field with the Calf-Teria buckets.

“Did you see that?” he says. He points to the electric wire fencing running around the barn. It lies in dangerous, quivering spools on the ground.  “I put that up myself,” he says.

I work in an office downtown.

“How was your weekend?” my boss asks on Monday. I put my lunch on my desk: a sandwich, an apple, a package of crackers, a bag of low-fat biscuits. Turn on my computer. Start the routine. She sits across me from me in an identical grey cube.

“That’s really random,” she says.

“What is?”

“Your story about the cows.”

“My husband’s family lives on a farm.”

“Really?”

We work for the newspaper’s website. My boss has a baby too, a girl that she never sees. My boss is at work when I get there. She’s at work when I leave. I go to meetings and I come out of them. I stare at the computer, at miles and miles of HTML code, a language I don’t really understand.  It’s like staring into the abyss. I think about the baby at daycare. I think about him all the time.

“You can’t quit,” my husband said. “We can’t afford it.”

“But I want to,” I said.

“But you can’t,” he said. He’s a high school English teacher. He says we can’t survive on his salary alone. I’ve done the math. I’ve tried to figure it out. Stretch the money this way and that way, but it never works out. It never covers the basics.

The weather is turning to spring. The sky is the color of eggshells.

I put the baby in the car every morning, fix all his latches and drive across town. He holds on tight when I pick him up and carry him into daycare. He smells like angel food, dusted and sweet.

I walk across the lawn, the baby holding on to my neck, and get my ankles wet from the grass. The walk is the worst part, if you ask me. I walk across the lawn so that I don’t have to walk behind the other mothers. I watch them and think: How could you do that?  Leave your baby behind? And then I go ahead and do the same thing.

I spend Saturday in the sandbox with the baby. We move the sand through our fingers. “Like sand through the hourglass,” my husband says.

He goes inside to turn on some jazz. There are coffee and black plums that we bought at the store. Even the baby eats them.

My father-in-law comes into town for dinner. We sit outside on collapsible chairs. He drinks all the wine in the house.

“I painted Picasso’s daughter once,” he says.

“You did not,” my husband says.

“I did,” my father-in-law says. “She wasn’t a handsome woman. She looked over her shoulder, like this,” he says. He stands up and bats his eyes, coquettish, over his shoulder.

He lived in Italy for the first three years of his marriage. It’s where they got married. My mother-in-law thought she was going to see the world.  They lived in a small apartment off the Spanish Steps. Then she ended up on a farm in Virginia, milking goats.

“How are the calves?” my husband asks.

“Fine,” my father-in-law says. He looks at the street. “Do you all like veal?” he asks. Everybody laughs.

Monday morning, I’m running late. The baby throws all his food on the floor and pitches a fit when I try to put his arms in his jacket. He clings to my neck, tearful, when I drop him off at day care.

“Who’s being a baby?” Debra, our day care provider, says.

She reaches out her arms and the baby goes to her. He rests his head on her shoulder. She rocks him from side to side. There is a din of noise around them: kids playing, yelling, crying.  Dora The Explorer is on the TV, shouting about something. But they are the silent center, my baby and the woman who watches him, rocking from side to side. He wraps his arms around her neck.

I walk into work dazed and it takes me the whole day to figure out, what am I doing?  Who do I need to call?  What’s going on here? Sometimes I’ll spend the whole day, inputting events into the calendar: festivals, concerts, sew ‘n’ sips. It is easy and mindless and stupid.

“Where is the package on farmer’s markets?” my boss says. “And theme parks? What are you doing?” she says. She is fast and busy typing. “Did you spend your whole day on calendar again?”

It took me a year to understand what “packages” meant. It means I’m supposed to write the content for the package. And the HTML code.  I have to make tables, insert columns, close lines.

“Don’t you have a program that will do that?” I ask my boss, every time.

“You have to do it this way,” she says and opens up a whole page of code: brackets and back slashes. Just looking at it makes me feel sick. I don’t know how to write code. I’m a writer, but I was hired to work on the newspaper’s website. Which apparently means I need to write code and not sentences. I have books on my desks, little dictionaries, filled with the stuff, but I still don’t understand it. So I avoid it, do what I know how to do, type in more calendar events. Canoe Run Field Day. Half-off sushi and Wii bowling. Where do they come up with this stuff? They’re so hopeful and promising. Like a date.

“We could move to your father’s,” I say to my husband. To the big white Colonial on the farm.

It’s about an hour and a half drive out of town. Not convenient, but do-able. Some people have worse commutes.

“Don’t start,” my husband says.

“I can’t help it.”

We have the same conversation we have every Sunday night. We go at it in circles, pacing the same steps, working out the same circular logic.

“What do you want me to say?” my husband says.

“I want you to say you’ll fix it.”

“I can’t,” he says.

We tried living on his salary alone, once before, when I tried to make it as a freelancer. We were always short, always overdrawn, always on the brink of financial disaster.

“But I’m his mother,” I say.

“Are you really going to do this?” he says.

“Do what?”

“Ruin everything.”

…

To read the rest of this story, please pick up the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. AQR can be found at most Barnes & Noble bookstores  or through the magazine’s website. Many thanks to AQR for publishing this story.

I have a short story in the newest issue of Alaska Quarterly Review.

I knew it had been accepted, but I didn’t know when it was going to come out.

But it came in the mail the other day and it’s a really beautiful 30th anniversary edition with stunning photographs. I thought, What timing!

Because I’ve been blogging about Warsaw lately – the story was inspired by it and what it was like to return to work after having a baby.

Which felt pretty awful, to be honest.

I don’t feel like that anymore. But I did then.

Drunken Boat asked me to write an essay about music.

I started writing about music. Then wrote about my writing process. And an unfortunate episode trying to write a novel with note cards.

Check it out here.

And here’s a short excerpt:

“Writing a novel takes a long, long time. It’s not one line or one scene or one character. It’s a bigger body of work. It has to work together—your beginning, your middle and your end. Your characters and your setting and your themes. The tropes and the objects that you repeat. It’s the full body of work, rather than the great line, that makes the novel great. It’s the grand overall that makes it sing, not the one pretty line on page 69.”

If you’re in the Richmond area, I’ll be speaking at the James River Writers Conference this week on dialogue.

I’ll be participating in a panel called “Putting Words in My Mouth: Dialing Up the Dialogue” with fellow writers Frankie Bailey, Jonathan Miles and Irene Ziegler.

My personal rule of thumb is to keep it simple.  Always use “she said” or “he said.”

Use “-ly” adverbs sparingly.

Forget about using quirky or different verbs for “said” like “she announced” or “he trilled.”  Just keep it simple.

Try to avoid the present tense “I say.”  I used to do that all the time until a teacher said it just sounds weird.  “Who says ‘I say’? That’s just ridiculous,” he said.

The conference is currently sold-out, but call if interested in the waiting list.

My mom called the other day to tell me, “You should be like Julie Powell.”

She had just seen the movie “Julie & Julia.”  And she loved it. It was awesome.

She proceeded to give me the full summary of the movie and the real-life back story of Julie Powell, the writer, for the next fifteen minutes…

“It’s about Julia Child and Julie Powell, the writer. She’s a girl who had a boring day job — just like you! — and she started blogging. Do you know how to blog?”

“Mom…”

“So she started cooking and she started blogging. And then she started blogging about cooking…”

“Mom…”

“You should do that. You could start a blog. You could be famous.”

“I know, Mom. I know who Julie Powell is.  She was in the anthology I edited, remember?  She wrote the funny one about ‘Rubber Chicken’? About how everything at her wedding tasted like rubber chicken?”

Crickets.

“Well…you could still do that.”

Anyway, if you’re a Julie Powell fan, you should check out her essay, “Rubber Chicken” from Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings. 

Here’s an excerpt

“Rubber Chicken” by Julie Powell

Though I was young, I was already something of a foodie, by which I mean that I had developed a cluster of firmly held culinary prejudices, a mishmash of New York snobbery and reactionary regionalism that, considered together, added up to a telling, not altogether flattering self-portrait.

…I abhorred every meal I’d ever eaten at a wedding or benefit.  I was better than that.  This was to be the first night of the rest of my life, my first night as a hostess and wife, and the food served on that rented china atop those be-tableclothed tables under the live oaks was going to be the proving ground for a lifetime of hospitality, grace, and good taste.

What I didn’t realize was that I was messing with a law as immutable as entropy or gravity.  Hundreds of guests + unreasonable expectations + catering – billions of dollars = rubber chicken.  Hubris, that was my problem.

Now, go buy it so I can be rich and famous like Julie Powell.  (Kidding, sort of.)

BUY THE BOOK:

If you’re in Richmond on Thursday, April 30, I’ll be participating in The Writing Show. You should come on by.

This week’s topic is Building A Writing Career: Literary Magazines, MFA Programs, Writers Conferences, Contests and the Necessary Art of Rejection.

I’ll be sharing the panel with the lovely and talented Thom Didato, editor of www.failbetter.com and Mary Flinn, editor of Blackbird. Both are fantastic online publications and Blackbird was kind enough to publish my short story, “The Boss’s Boyfriend,” a few years ago.

Should be an interesting discussion. I’m looking forward to what everybody has to say.  A lot of changes are going on in the industry and I’m curious to see what the editors have to say about it. 

For instance, I’m starting to wonder more and more, why don’t authors just publish immediately to the Internet?  Will the Kindle change publishing?  Will people post their manuscripts directly to their websites and have people download them for a small fee?  Or like what Stephen King’s doing with the Internet and self-publishing?  Who knows….all I know for sure is that changes are coming fast and furious.  

I work at daily newspaper for my day job.  It’s the biggest newspaper in the state.  And we’re seeing massive changes on a daily basis with users going to the Internet.  A year ago, we thought print wouldn’t go away.  Now, elimination appears imminent.  

Book publishing is much slower and probably won’t see the changes as soon as we are…but I can’t help but think the waves of change we’re experiencing at the newspaper will come to book publishing eventually.

Welcome to my new DIY website.

I’ve been wanting to update my site for a long time and finally…here we go.

On the new site, you’ll find:

• Short stories.  Did you know I write short stories too?  Now you do!  Check out “Fine Young Woman”, a short short originally published in Meridian, below. Or click on the short story category for more published stories.

• Online-only exclusive material…..

• News, updates, maybe even some audio and video if I get really fancy.