Hi.
First, I want to say a giant thank you to the Poetry Center
for inviting me to come here, for giving me this fantastic
place to stay right on the other side of this wall,
pretty much, and the opportunity to be able to just write
all day long.
It's been fantastic.
And thanks, especially, to the very warm and generous Tyler
Meier and Allie Leach, and poetry
docents Christine Baines, who's here somewhere,
and Arthur Naiman.
I've just been so grateful for this poetry residency program,
and especially that they allowed me, a fiction writer,
to come this summer.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read from a story tonight called "Grow Your
Eyelashes", which I'm envisioning
as the first story in the collection
that I've been working on while I've been here.
And I'm going to read just about 2/3 of the story.
So if it seems to stop a bit abruptly, that's why.
It's not the end.
Thank you so much.
"Grow Your Eyelashes."
"We are all in love with the baby.
We, meaning the number four bus community,
weekday mornings during the 7 o'clock hour.
The baby wears a royal blue snuggly
jacket and a green knit hat.
He tracks our shopworn overly articulated faces.
Despite how we caper, tilting and bouncing our heads,
scrunching our lips, and wriggling our noses, working
our hands into furious highs, the baby
is cheery with his baby gift of a grin, a wave, a mimic.
He gazes at us with his grave baby face,
obliging just often enough to lend hope to our campaigns.
The father is charming, and an early thirties smiler
of undetermined ethnicity, perhaps
South American, with warm eyes and skin, and a soft voice,
generous with the vowels.
Strapped to the father's chest, the baby flaps his puffy arms.
There's something of a bird in him,
both cautious and confident, something of a bird,
and something of a sad little clown,
and something of a medicine man, and all of the possibilities
that are open to a baby.
We feel that when we look at him,
he who will not say or even think that it is rude to stare.
I say that we are all in love with the baby,
but probably there is someone on this bus who is not.
Probably someone looks out the window,
or at the father's rosy ear, or at her own lap,
and thinks, god damn that baby.
[LAUGHING]
This person is not swayed by the miniature hands,
the swollen cheeks, the exploratory chirps, not swayed
by this new human welcomed as if he
belongs to all of our delicate hopes and magnanimous impulses.
As other faces soften, she hardens hers.
I'm willing to believe that there
is such a person in our cozy bus community with the chatty women
and the tenderly grizzled men, and the driver who says,
so long, tiny guy, when the baby leaves,
borne aloft by his smiling father.
We are trying, my husband Kevin and me.
I wish that meant we were trying to teach a monkey
to do sign language, or trying out this new robot that
cleans bathrooms, or trying to save the world, one polar ice
cap at a time.
But when you are a childless couple in your mid-thirties,
with two full-time jobs, and a three bedroom house,
everyone knows what 'trying' means.
Once, making love, we thought, 'breasts,' or 'penis,'
'vagina,' or 'balls,' thought them hard as the dependable
pleasure things they were.
Then we thought, 'baby,' almost sexier than sex for sex,
a mystery beyond tit for tat physical love.
We thought not quite 'sperm and egg,' those clinical unlovely
words, but something like 'seed,' 'pearl,' 'embryo,'
'pregnant,' 'fetus,' 'heartbeat,' 'fingers,' 'toes,'
'belly bump,' 'baby love,' 'genius,' 'baby.'
[LAUGHING]
We thought we'd make this thing.
No, not a thing--
the only non-thing thing that we could ever make.
We've been thinking this baby into limbo existence
for 11 months now.
The baby isn't coming.
The baby is perched somewhere, her tiny fists
and her fierce dainty mouth.
I picture her the way Christian children are taught
to think of babies God hasn't released from heaven yet,
fully formed and squeaky clean, enthroned
in clouds, parents, an unnecessary earthly
contrivance.
One Saturday, I make the mistake of going to the mall.
My sister's birthday is in a week,
and I'd like to get her an interesting piece of clothing.
Just inside the mall's entryway, a woman on the side
greets me, a beautiful woman, though not high cheekbones,
sultry lips, sculpted breasts, beautiful.
The idea is she's the kind of beautiful
I might be if I tried a little harder,
and listened to the voices that are trying to help me.
Grow your eyelashes, this voice says.
[LAUGHTER]
There is, apparently, a scientific formula for it.
Do the eyelashes on the woman who
could be me seem to have recently experienced a growth
spurt?
They are noticeably mascara laden,
but otherwise unremarkable.
Perhaps my doppelganger is just about to call the phone
number presented here.
She knows her eyelashes are fine,
but that they could be even better.
She's on the verge of possessing the eyelashes she's always
wanted, not falsies, but real ones, cultivated
from her very own eyelids.
Inside the mall, I go to store to store
looking for something interesting for my sister
Audrey.
She lives near Boston with her husband, and their two
chickens.
Patsy and Cline are surprisingly endearing pets.
They live in a coop in the garden
where they take daily strolls through the sweet alyssum,
nodding agreeably.
When they want company, they press their beaks
to the back door.
You pick them up and stroke their feathers,
and they seem to expand to fill your arms.
Audrey and Jeff don't plan to have kids.
As far as I know, they're in agreement on this,
being neither the maternal nor the paternal sort.
As a girl, I played with my dolls every day.
Otherwise, they'd miss me.
And Audrey, two years my junior, could be conscripted to join,
but she coddled no babies of her own.
She was the movie star aunt, in her feather boa and plumed hat.
'I'm just in from Europe, dearie,' she'd say.
'How about an Eiffel Tower?'
An Eiffel Tower was anything she could stack up
that weren't blocks--
Oreos, bean bags, packets of pocket tissues.
I dressed the dolls, and brushed their hair,
and she let towers fall in their laps.
She's an architect now, specializing
in sustainable public projects.
And she goes to movies in the evening,
and eats popcorn for dinner.
'We don't feel the need for children,' Audrey told
our wounded mother last Thanksgiving.
'You have to need them, I think, need them so much you
don't think you can be happy without them.'
Mom shook her head, proud and sad, on its turkey neck.
'That's not how it works.
You can't know the joy until--' she swiped at a tear that was
about to fall into the wild rice stuffing--
'--you just can't know it.'
'Look how happy I'm making you,' Audrey said.
[LAUGHTER]
The women's clothing departments are highlighting
bizarre clothes this season, salmon pink, pea green, recycle
bin blue, and styles that make no sense.
3/4 sleeves?
Capri pants?
Short sleeve sweater dresses?
T-shirts with collars?
I don't have to look too long in each store
to see that there is nothing here.
The sales ladies ask if they can help, but how could they?
Finally, in a Macy's daze, I get Audrey a cream-colored cable
knit sweater.
There's nothing offensive or unique about it.
I'm tempted to buy one for myself, too,
but I don't want us to look like twins, even
in two different states.
If I had twins, I would give them
names that sounded nothing like each other--
Suzana and Mim; Theodore and Jack.
One twin would wear airplane pajamas, the other stripes.
I wouldn't call them 'the twins.'
Nor would I perform experiments on them
to see how alike they were.
It would be very hard to have two tiny babies, one
on each breast.
But with twins, we'd have ourselves a family in one go--
the adults, two children, the sturdiness of four."