In Which We Neaten Each Crease

Those Marble Composition Books

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

On that first date we fell asleep watching Bottle Rocket. The poem ended one line after as I described his tissue paper thin t-shirt that I borrowed for the night.

I was twenty-two and high the first and only time I have ever written a love poem. With perceived eloquence I sat on my bed and remembered a first date from years ago, detailing each bit chronologically on a piece of paper I have now lost. Using the kind of scrutiny one might assume when proving a point, I produced a poem that offered little attention to feelings or the fumbling beginnings of closeness: shaky eye contact, commonalities, taut and clumsy flirtation, cool smiles, heartbeat. Instead, I rattled off a joyless inventory of the night; a tally of what I had ordered, what he had worn, which album we had argued about, and on what street we shared a kiss. My bias for pragmatic writing outdid my hope for something more sentimental (!) and meaningful. This was a list disguised as a poem, and worst of all, I took pleasure in its accuracy, persuaded that precise recollection might yield more tenderness than dopey hearts and shooting teenage inclinations.

My habit for list keeping could be isolated to a single memory, like connecting someone’s command and sway to that first group exercise in the fourth grade in which there was a time keeper, a secretary, and a leader, and where we were taught the verb to delegate, or, like tracing versatility to resourceful, creative parents who despite moving the family numerous times in earlier years, were quick to design the notion of home around a single and consistent possession or tradition; the giant Dieffenbachia plant, banana fritters after school, or sandalwood soap in all of the bathrooms. In my case, I’m sure there was an adult—a friend’s mother, a piano teacher, most likely a woman who could French braid and who kept curative distractions and snacks in her purse, and that I ruefully wished was my own mother—this same woman, hoping to quiet whatever anxiety was overpowering me at the time, handed me a pad and pencil and said, Here, Durga. Make a list.

I am unclear if this likely compounded memory mushroomed into a character trait, though part of me believes that my impulse is largely intuitive and present in those who, from very early on are bound by some need to record and restore, and seek pattern, as if preoccupied with some expectation of defeat.

As a kid, I often spied on everyday happenings, assuming a Harriet Welsch compulsion to fabricate intrigue in nominal things: decoding neighbors' license plates, perceiving foreign accents, supposing ulterior purpose from things that unscrewed, appeared fancy, or were unmarked. I collected long lists of notes that shared zero relation but were somehow kindred because I had decided on that day to collect them in a blue spiral notebook on a page marked Thursday, June 5th, 1995.

I was nine and couldn't steady the length of our aluminum pool skimmer. I remember the feeling of cold water running down my arms as I tried to navigate the net before giving up and asking my brother for help. I sat and watched as he scooped and cleaned the leaves that had fallen from our neighbor’s Maple tree. The sound of the pole’s metal din as it scraped the sides of our pool was very specific and I haven’t heard it since. Years later as I scrambled to find a half-filled notebook and recycle it for a new class, I discovered the page on which I had seemingly indexed our entire backyard. I had accounted for everything: the chipped shed door that revealed an old coat of aquamarine, the fat azalea bush, the smell of chlorine, the feel of wet cement under my bare feet, and the sound of the skimmer as it shaved the side our pool. Matching that uniquely stark shift of entering a place where quiet is obliged — the library, a museum, a church — I read the list over.

Though I was happy to find this anecdote from my childhood, I was troubled by its judicious and ordinary range, but more so by its delusive expectation of custody...and loss? Still, these concerns pass just as easily as they present themselves. Our childhood, a maudlin alloy of lapse memory and possession: my cursive handwriting was once bulky, round and sweet; the bottom corner of the page still curls where I pressed hard on my palm and wrote in black ballpoint.

Sometimes hidden among my lists were a build-up of details that hinted at change — notes on a distracted family dinner, unusual pairing-offs of parent with child; splitting up to park the car, buy the tickets, save the seats — and by and by, clear signs of my mother and father’s eventual divorce.

Children list-keepers expect filigree from collected facts. They care deeply about their first family tree assignment in school, and though their T-shaped diagrams might pile awkwardly to one side of the page, lopsided with a wing of extended cousins or half-siblings, its carefulness and fidelity to specifics embodies the kind of exhaustive design that inhabits their everyday. Baited by Haeckel's lithographs, by grandparent stuff, and by cutaways in DK Eyewitness travel guides, children list-keepers are yanked by asides, labyrinths, and stories of missing kids and mysterious abductions. Envious of those with photographic memory, children list-keepers will anxiously store incidentals that might later guild together. Their minds: a cherry wood curio cabinet filled with doodads and trinkets, invaluable for future analogies, and called upon years later in college when a professor assigns the ratios and ornament amid expanse of Moby Dick.

It was in my literature classes that my hankering for cataloguing was put to use. I would copy a novel's first sentence only to hear its echo in Part IV or Part V. I would predict romantic pairings based on how a woman's dress was depicted — not its cloth nor its color — but how it moved at her feet or sat on her shoulders. I kept notes on recurring characters, peculiar posture, food pageantry, and individuals who never removed their gloves or their hats. I especially took to narratives where childhood was imparted with an overture-type clairvoyance. Those were my favorite.

Instead of flagging pages with post-its, I dutifully copied entire passages into notebooks that I would return to when writing a paper or when trying hopelessly to retrieve whatever it was in that particular sentence or pair of words that had originally wooed me. Sometimes my reason was far less calculated: a Dickens character that I imagined as a Tintin character, and that I'd share with my friend, Tait, via text message on my walk back to the dorm. Studying literature paired the utility with the coincidence of list keeping; something I had seldom enjoyed before. Because my first impulse has always been to write it down, whatever it is, immediate function has been a rarity and meaning has presented itself in belated, sometimes confused, bounty.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about Daddy Longlegs. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Our Composition Book" - Wild Nothing (mp3)

"My Angel Lonely" - Wild Nothing (mp3)

"Chinatown" - Wild Nothing (mp3)

In Which Your Son Spit At Me

Babysitting

by JESSICA FERRI

Babysitting teaches you that no family is the same. The very first thing you notice is the house. This family has a different house from mine, it’s bigger or smaller, messier or cleaner. Living on a cul de sac, there were plenty of families to choose from. You live on a golf course in what’s called a “subdivision.” (A subdivision of what?) Sitting at the kitchen table in one home you realize you are looking at completely different part of the golf course. How does it color your life to be situated at the tee rather than on the fairway?

I started babysitting around age thirteen. I wanted spending money for trips to the mall, CDs, books and nail polish. I had adored my own babysitter, Gretchen, with her purple hair and tongue ring. I have always loved kids. It makes sense. When you’re thirteen, the idea that someone could look up to you is a big deal.

Some mothers have explicit instructions for their children: baby in bed by 7, older kids by 9, make sure everyone brushes their teeth and says their prayers. One child pointedly asked me “Are you a Catholic?” No, I responded. I was raised in the Methodist Church. “What is that?” she wondered. I replied that it was still Christian, just Protestant. “But not Catholic?” she said. No. She seemed worried by my response. Other mothers simply bounce out the door, either disheveled or looking and smelling great, breezily chirping “Thanks Jessica!” There’s a tangible sensuality when a married couple gets all dolled-up for a night on the town, leaving you in charge of their children. You are somehow complicit in their romance. You are helping them! And then: I’ll be adult like that someday, with a husband who wears aftershave, own an SUV, birth five kids. You shake it off, though.

Fridges full of carrots, or alternatively, Krispy Kreme donuts. Diet cokes with lime. Beer, or booze that under no circumstance would I ever touch. Some parents are generous. “Eat whatever you want! Watch TV!” But I was responsible. I was the babysitter.

Infants are the easiest. You simply watch them sleep, mostly — occasionally you change a diaper or you get a bottle ready. One night I put the baby down and read all of Interview with the Vampire while she slept soundly without a peep. Another night, different baby, crawled into every room of the house looking for her mom. When she reached the middle of the room and realized mom was no where to be found she would suddenly burst into uncontrollable sobs. I had no idea what to do. I tried to pick her up, but she squirmed and struggled to get away. I tried talking to her, telling her mom is coming back, I promise. I tried singing. She looked offended. Finally I gave in and cried, too. When she saw that I was crying, she stopped.

Older children can be frighteningly aggressive. They beat their younger siblings, and you have to punish them. They don’t like this, and can say things like “you aren’t my mom so you can’t tell me what do.” One little boy actually spit at me from across the room. You then must firmly respond that you are in charge and if no apologies are made there will be no SpongeBob SquarePants. Things can go awry. Juice is spilled, pants and beds are wet. Once, in a kiddie pool we were attacked by hornets. You cannot make this stuff up. I grabbed a seven year old boy, slung him around my back, and raced indoors, both of us screaming all the way.

Then they disappear. Watching four or five at a time, you look and one is gone. Oh, Christ. You’ve really done it now. You failure! You’ve lost the child. You’ll go to prison. Everything’s over. You race around the house calling and calling but nothing. You ask the eldest child, have you seen your brother? Trying not to let the overwhelming panic show on your face. “Nah,” she says. “Who knows where he is!” An hour goes by. Mom comes home. I can’t find him, you say. I can’t find your child. But she, being Mom, knows exactly where he is. At the neighbor’s, looking at the new baby. In what seems like the most gracious gesture, she isn’t even upset with you. “Don’t worry about it!”

When the adults reappear you want to tell them you people don’t know your children at all. Your eight-year-old daughter just asked me if I was a Catholic. Your son spit at me from across the room. Your baby wouldn’t stop crying. Your ten year old daughter wants to know what sex is. Did you know all this? You want to ask them. How are you doing this every day? Exhausted, bleary-eyed, I go home, cash hot in my hands, watch late-night TV, tell my own mom about the antics, and fall into a dreamless sleep.

One morning I wake up and I’m too old to babysit. A mom calls “Can you sit next Saturday?” I can’t, I have a date, or a party to go to. I have to shop for my Prom dress. I have to apply for college. Suddenly, as I drive down the street, the children I once fed, changed, and bathed are teenagers, gangly and alien. My horror is silent, but real. They are older, I am older, and before I know it I am gone.

Much later, one of them dies. A child is dead. A child who felt your legs, wondered about shaving hers. “Do you want to get married?” she once asked. I don’t know, I said. “Why not?” Well, I’m just not too sure. “But don’t you want to have babies?” Yes, I do. But sometimes you can have babies without being married. “Well, that would be weird! Who would be the Daddy?” The grief you feel is unexpected since you hadn’t even laid eyes on her in seven years. She was seventeen. And here you are, you’re twenty-four. Where am I? You feel completely lost. But you check yourself, and you think of her mother. You are, after all, the babysitter.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her website is here. She blogs here and you can find more of her work on This Recording here.

"The Falling Snow" - Damien Jurado (mp3)

"Kansas City" - Damien Jurado (mp3)

"Kalama" - Damien Jurado (mp3)

In Which Life Is So Content And Complete From Where We're Sitting

Therapy

by MEREDITH HIGHT

My freshman year in high school, I worked so hard. I wanted to make all As and be pretty and be good. I wanted to be friends, make friends. I wanted to move on from middle school, start over. Be a new person, be my own person.

Everything was going OK until things started the next year, the sophomore year. I got my braces off. I got pretty. Boys were calling, and I didn’t really understand why or what they wanted. It made me feel strange, why they would call my house and want to talk to me, my mom was always in the next room.

I met geometry and chemistry. I don’t understand these subjects now, I didn’t then. All of a sudden I was getting C’s and D’s. I was supposed to be good, I was supposed to be so smart. before I was smart, now I wasn’t.

Before, being smart was the only thing I was ever really good at. reading, and knowing things, and understanding things and being smart. I couldn’t do sports all that well, or dance or gymnastics or even girl scouts. I was always bored by those things.

I just wanted to stay home and read.

But the boys kept calling and the classes kept coming and there wasn’t a plan anymore, I was just making it up as I went along, I didn’t know how to do this.

I made out with boys but I didn’t know anything about sex and I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I thought making out was bad. I was lost. my parents were worried. I read and loved books like The Bell Jar and Go Ask Alice and Life Without Friends.

In short I loved books about depressed girls who wanted to kill themselves.

After a while I went to a therapist. Depression was not then what it is now, you know, like alcoholism or anorexia. I didn’t know what depression was. I just knew I felt heavy sometimes, dead. Maybe my parents understood, I don’t know, they just wanted me to be happy. That is all good parents who love you want, is for you to be happy.

I wish I could give them this.

The therapist was in his late thirties or early forties. He was kind, but I do not think he knew what to do with me. He was a blonde redhead, balding just a little bit. He was probably attracted to me, and I made him uncomfortable.

This is not a judgment, just the truth.

I don’t say that because of how I look or anything special about me. I say that because sometimes it just comes down to man and woman and it is that simple. You can’t take it personally. The instinct, at least. It's what you do with that instinct, really, that counts.

I failed some test, geometry maybe. My geometry teacher tried so hard to help me understand, but I just couldn’t understand. He knew how much it upset me, he could tell I was trying so hard.

Sometimes in class I would fantasize that actually I was some sort of savant and I actually just grasped math on a different level than everyone else but no one understood it yet.

That was not the case.

My geometry teacher wrote me a nice note though, at the end of the year. I think I finished with a C, maybe. I knew that that combined with my ineptitude with chemistry and science meant that I would not get one of those amazing scholarships, that I would not be the overachiever I had always hoped to be. But this note meant a lot. It was so thoughtful, this note. He just wrote that he knew I tried so hard and maybe something about going easier on myself, or something.

Before all that, I was supposed to be at a pep rally or something in the gym but instead I was in the bathroom, crying. The last time I was in the bathroom at school like that I had gotten my period for the first time. My stomach had hurt all morning and then it happened and I was so confused, I didn’t understand my body, or what it was doing,

Even though I had read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

It was after the crying in the bathroom, after the test, that I was sent to this therapist. He was a nice man. but I didn’t know how to relate to him or what to say, I just mostly stared at the clock and watched the hands pass the time, like one of the depressed girls in one of those books I read did.

sylvia and tedSometimes the therapist would ask me questions, more about my behavior than my feelings, like have you been drinking alcohol? And so on. Sure I had tried it. but I didn’t understand how to do that, either really. I didn’t drink much, even then. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t have sex. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

He had pictures of his twins on his desk. They were toddlers. I asked him about them once, and he smiled and I smiled. I liked the sight of those twins, they were blonde and they were young and they were happy. I noticed his gold wedding band. He was so vanilla. His life looked so content, so complete, from where I was sitting.

I do remember one time he asked me what was bothering me, why was I sad, and I said, because. The whole idea I had of my life, what schools I would go to, what I would accomplish, how successful I would be, how smart I was, what I could do, was over. It was all over, before it had even begun.

I was fifteen.

I had already figured out that I wasn’t going to be who I wanted to be, I said, and I was always going to be less than what I wanted to be. Plus, now I knew how hard it was for me, how sensitive I was, how easily stressed I became, how emotional, how difficult it was just for me to be me.

I was fifteen.

I can already see my whole life before me, I said. I can already see how hard it will be, I can already feel what it will be like. I know all the motions I will go through, college, work. I know what it will all feel like.

I know how hard it will be.

He did not respond.

I think he may have known I was right.

Meredith Hight is the contributing editor to This Recording. She lives in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

"Down to the Ocean" - Grouper (mp3)

"Follow In Our Dreams" - Grouper (mp3)

"Heart Current" - Grouper (mp3)