In Which We Miss Several Hundred Others

Writing Back

by AMANDA OLIVER

Your life is not what you thought it would be. You thought by now you would have a best-selling book or a house or at least a baby. When did you first think these things? Eighteen? Nineteen? Always? After you turned twenty-five life started to feel unreal, like you'd be getting a do-over button any day now. Your peers started settling down and sorting out and you felt misplaced.

Adulthood only mixed things up for you. Responsibilities disrupted the idea of dreams, which were never very clear to you anyway. A book, a house, a baby. You still think about that king-sized bed in Boston and how you discovered your body could roll away from him twice and you still didn't reach the edge. You still think about driving drunk down the street you lived on, going five miles per hour, sobbing and pleading he would be waiting at your place. Using the rules of The Secret to will it into existence, but you didn't see him again for another three years and, by then, good riddance. You wandered New York City and cried in crosswalks for one full month and slept with friends of friends and boyfriends of friends. You bought platform shoes.

Your cheeks became surfaces of tiny bumps and your mother tells you, Rosacea. Your mother assures you, Rosacea. Just like her. You plan trips and you travel and it feels good to have something the rest do not. Books, houses, babies do not travel well, but you do. In Nice, you yell "I'm leaving" at the British geologist who asks whether you'll sleep on the beach with him. You yell it at least twice before you realize there is no tram service or taxis and the inquiring man has thrown his hands up and walked away backwards like it's a stick-up. You plod the length of the tram, looking down side streets until you find a driver willing to take you back to your hostel. He takes all of your European money and your American money as fare. It’s late, he explains. In the morning you write the British man an e-mail to apologize and he responds that he enjoyed you. Was intrigued. Will you meet him by the beach you first met on a few days earlier? Whole paragraphs and you never write back. You picture him standing on all of the rocks and squinting into the sun as he tries to look for you. He probably went swimming. He probably met someone else.

In Barcelona your host expects that you'll be like the other Americans who have come to stay. Party, party, party he explains and tells you a story in broken English about two girls pretending to be "Funny Bunnies". You stare blankly back at his expectant face when he is finished. "That's not an American thing, sorry. I'm not sure." You feel old. Dislocated. You travel. You travel. When you do not, you rotate around routines. Farmer’s market eggs on Saturday, Kramerbooks on Sunday, at least one Smithsonian museum a week. You count the escalator steps, you guess what people will eat for lunch.

You apply to creative writing MFA programs for fiction and you are not a fiction writer. You are rejected from every single one and you wonder whether that was exactly what you wanted. Your stories make no sense to you a year later. You decide to forgive everyone who has ever hurt you. You decide to quit your job. You decide to be happy. Decisions are not your strength -- wavering is. So, you waver. You seek the ocean. You come expecting answers and you get waves. They're no longer the metaphorical things they used to be, but they are still beautiful. You try to see yourself in that, but you're tired of metaphors and similes and anything that might be related to writing or poems.

You listen to the same song on repeat and words come, but they are not your own. You have written the lyrics. You finally get glasses and you stop traveling so much. You commit to a person and a place. You bake bread and wash the dishes in the sink. Loading the dishwasher will never be your thing. You buy a box of records and only listen to The Carpenters and John Denver. You think about buying a car or a moped or some form of transportation that you cannot sell for 50 dollars on Craigslist when you leave again. You walk every day and use a face scrub on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Your desk piles with new books and you miss several hundred others in boxes back east.

 You write, but it is no longer a way of discovering yourself. It is for paying credit card bills and achieving notoriety or at least a Google alert. You write, but you can never decide on endings. You seek endings, but you can never settle. You have memories, but it feels like you weren’t there at all. Like you are remembering stories someone told you when you were little, half-heard whisperings just before you gave into sleep. You commit to a group climbing Mount Kilamanjaro. You look for the cheapest flights to Alaska. Your life is not what you thought it would be.

Amanda Oliver is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

The Best of Amanda Oliver

Keeping company

Fourteen countries in one summer

Developing a travel notebook

Trying to maintain better posture

Her name on a bathroom wall

Following each other on the website

"Girls in General" - She and Lono (mp3)

"Mixed Messages" - She and Lono (mp3)

In Which We Try To Maintain Better Posture

Unplanned

by AMANDA OLIVER

My grandfather is bad and I guess I did not know how bad that meant. Not bad like misbehaving, bad like he doesn't understand the word Thanksgiving anymore. Not the meaning of it, the sentimental values attached, but the word itself. He also doesn't know where his coat is or his gloves or why we have him out in the hallway ready to go out a door. As my parents and I are helping him into the car someone says something about grandpa and he says, "I'm not old enough to be a grandpa!" 

When we start driving he screams "NORTH WEST!" from behind me and I wonder for a moment if he knows my next travel destination before I realize he is reading the electronic direction off of the rearview mirror.

What he remembers is to salute every American flag. That he was in the army. My mother sits in the back seat and says, "Good job, Dad" each time we pass the familiar red, white, and blue. I think how strange it is, what we remember. How the military must bark orders and routines enough to make something stay, even through this.

He reads the names of things. "Play and Learn Center", "Episcopal Church", "North". I choke on tears and laughter when he shouts, "McDonald's!" with disgusted emphasis placed on the Don part of things. He remembers McDonald's is no good. 

When we arrive he settles into a brown leather chair not unlike the one he used to have when I was little, the one that was so big and smooth that my cousins and I would sit straight up in it and let our bodies slide all of the way back down to folded knees on the floor. Again, again.

He reads an atlas. Conversation carries on around him, my newest cousin arrives in a turkey onesie and I hold him and smell his head and wonder if anything is more soft and perfect than a baby, and my grandfather continues to read and call out places where he has been. He announces that he needs to go get his other son. Says his first, middle, and last name. Bobby is in Australia, Dad. With Sarah and Anna and Andrew. 

At dinner he points at things and tells us what they are. I know this song. That dresser is from Norfolk. Not Virginia, but the Buffalo street he grew up on. He can name my two cousins in the frames behind their heads at the dinner table. I am the third girl sitting next to them. 

"Is that a little cup?"

"No, Dad, that's a little candle in a jar."

My mother talks about the troubles of getting him here, how he went to bed and loudly refused to get out. He sits directly across from her and I realize he is not listening or, more likely, does not know it is him we are speaking about. He is not being offended. My grandmother says how hard it has been, the times he has scared her. They met when she was 22 and he was 20 and, on their first date, he spent most of his time speaking to another girl. She had not planned to see him again, but they ended up married with eight kids.

Two months ago, my grandmother was in the hospital with pneumonia. When I visited I asked how my grandfather proposed. She laughed and said, "There was no proposal. That man doesn't have a romantic bone in his body." When my grandmother was very sick for many months eight years ago, my grandfather kept a small black leather notebook filled with what she did on those days so he could tell her about it when she was well again. He has beautiful penmanship. 11:31 a.m. You tried jell-o today. I wonder now if he ever showed her.

When he is given coffee, he dumps more than pours the milk until it reaches the very top of his cup and, afraid he will keep going, afraid he will soak himself in hot coffee, my uncle takes the spoon and cup and creamer from his hand and says, "No, Dad. Stop, Dad." I can see my grandfather fighting back yelling. I can see my uncle fighting back everything. When the excess coffee is dumped and brought back to him, he immediately puts the cup to his lips and I start to say HOT! like trying to teach a toddler this new concept, but my mother tells me he is careful.

At the end, for his last two sips and since his pie is gone now, he says, "How am I supposed to finish my coffee?" 

I remember how his hair used to be neatly cut, carefully parted to the side, how all of his books were about some matter of history, how his conversation was minimal unless it deeply interested him, how his entire attitude and appearance commanded respect, how an infrequent joke of his own caused him to laugh most of all. How an untucked shirt on someone else unnerved him. How he prided himself on his neat appearance and good posture.

I remember being seven or eight, opening a paint-your-own-bird-house kit from him on my birthday. I remember when a bee stung him on a hike and then came for me with no stinger left. How he frantically searched my hair like it might still hurt me. I remember being a freshman in college and learning he kept a file in a locked drawer in his basement, neatly labeled Mandi’s Writing. I remember him in all of the ways he will never be again while he is sitting right in front of me.

And I do not know how he is supposed to finish his coffee.

Amanda Oliver is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her parents and her summer.

Photographs by the author.

"Laughing With" - Regina Spektor (mp3)

In Which We Flee From The Cornfield

Things You May Not Know

by AMANDA OLIVER

I visit fourteen countries in one summer. I stay awake for 36 hours, from Washington to Iceland to London, to avoid jet lag. I meet a woman name Kari on the airplane who is also traveling alone. She is from Seattle, she is a graphic designer, she is wearing white Nike hightops for the duration of her six-month trip and making a stop-motion video out of pictures of her feet near landmarks and other things. I like her immediately. In Nice I accidentally see the Tour de France and meet a man who is reporting on it for the BBC. He lets me appear in a shot he takes in nearby Eze. A retired chauffeur who does not like Americans offers to take me back down to the beach and I go with him. When I get out he hands me his business card and asks if I will write to his wife. She likes Americans. In each city I tell others how tourist sites do not impress me, but Segrada Familia stops me still in a crosswalk. I dance alone to Miike Snow with the windows open during everyone's siesta. I meet Kari again in Budapest and at the top of a castle over wine we pose questions for ourselves. Why are you doing this alone? In Vienna, my host has fourteen plastic razors. I count them each time I shower. Four of them are green. Her father died a few months ago and so did all of her plants. I throw out their remains, stain and varnish her patio furniture, help her buy new flowers. She teaches me how to make soft boiled eggs and the Viennese words for "I do not allow myself to be pushed." When I leave I want to tell her I love her. I don't like Berlin when I get there. The couple I stay with in Amsterdam fights in German, so I spend a lot of time at the museums. At first I can't figure out if they are fighting or just speak very loud, but I know the word "fuck" and she keeps using it. Rembrandt had a massive taxidermy collection. Van Gogh shot himself in a cornfield. Somewhere in the theatrics of his ear and third grade art class I missed this part. The canals are beautiful. It is gay pride week and everything is rainbow. A gay cowboy in pink chaps riding a jet pack zooms twenty feet out of the water in front of the Anne Frank museum.


It takes me 36 hours to get home and I am jetlagged for a week. I visit the Washington Monument, the park by my house, four of the Smithsonian museums. I wash my sheets and buy a new bottle of my old favorite shampoo. I try running. Anything to feel like me and home again.


I have 23 aunts and uncles. I could tell you which were through marriage, but most of their weddings happened before I was born or when I was very young and bloodlines meant nothing. They still mean nothing. My friend Kristin is more my sister than my brother is my brother. I used to get so tired, so drunk sometimes, that I would escape to the bathroom and roll my eyes as far up as I could with my lids open. I have never had relish. I can't do a cartwheel. Whenever I see a Hispanic or black kid in my neighborhood I assume I have taught them and often I am correct. People smile at you when children that aren't the same skin color as you come running over, squealing your name. They do not smile at you when they think you are wearing a weird outfit, usually something all black, but they smile when the kids run to you. People often think I am safe. Children and animals are correct. People are often wrong. I have been mistaken for a mirror, a punching bag, a solution. I have never been the solution. I can drive a car better than many men I know and some of them grant me this. Some of them tell me about each car they see approaching from the passenger seat. I try not to use the words "I know." When the leaves turn brown I am sad for days. When my friend died all of the leaves were changing and it felt unfair. I stood in the middle of a bridge and looked at all of the orange and red and green and for spent an hour calling each tree ugly. My first car is a 1998 Toyota Corolla. I have it for two weeks when I rear-ended a rabbi pulling his van into a church parking lot because I am looking at the snowflakes on my windshield. My car looks like an accordion, the airbag never comes out, and I am fine. The rabbi invites me in for tea he has recently brought back from Israel. Good things happen to me and I wonder if I notice them as often as they come. My high school boyfriend takes a job at the school where I student teach. I have not seen him in six years. He buys me a donut each morning and tells me he thought there would always be something between us. I tell him maybe it is the donut. I have a $2.80 topaz ring from Forever 21 that I have convinced many people I inherited from my mother. When I was seventeen my mother told me I was probably too big for her wedding dress. She had been very tiny back then. I hate taking out the trash. I am allergic to almost everything scented, but I love the way clothes smell after I've lent them to a friend. I am bad at sharing clothing. I have never willingly offered someone a few of my french fries. I will refuse to go somewhere I really want to go if someone asks me there and I think company will ruin the experience. I am happiest when I am wearing a sweatshirt. The sun is setting earlier. Three boys in my alley are playing a game where one aims a deflated basketball at the others. When one gets cut, the other shouts out his injury, and the third assesses. He is fine. No one watches them and they do not need it. Children have the ways of adults when no one is there to see. There are already brown leaves on the ground here. I am allergic to apples now; I can't have cider. I buy the last of the peaches at the farmer's market instead. I practice calligraphy and put on the wool socks I bought in Iceland. I wonder if home will ever be a place. I hate being interrupted when I am writing.

Amanda Oliver is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her parents.

Photographs by the author.

"Fog in the House of Lightbulbs" - Radical Face (mp3)