Contest 2002 Finalists

Already Dead
by
Jordan Rosenfeld

My godfather Jack is already dead, but he's the only one who doesn't know it yet. I can still see him at my outdoor wedding two summers ago: off from the rest of the crowd, immobile in a chair, the pallor of his skin gone green, his glazed eyes focused on some impossible spot on the horizon. When he missed his music cues and I walked down the grassy aisle in silence, I regretted assigning him the job of DJ. Later, I regretted inviting him at all.

Until my 26th birthday this summer, those of us who love him still considered him a living person, invited him to parties and tolerated his presence: "That's just Jack. Eccentric, esoteric." It took us a long time to add alcoholic.

Things never fall apart over night, after all. They spiral slowly down like dishwater through a clogged drain. The week after I kissed 26 goodbye, my godmother, Anita, sent him to stay in a motel without his car and house keys "for the duration." He could either get sober or rot there, she told us. Together they had packed a little knapsack, as if he were going to camp; perhaps she even wrote his name on his underwear with a felt-tipped pen, so someone could identify him later after he knocked himself unconscious or choked on his own vomit. He carried the liter of generic Vodka-with its neat, spill-proof plastic bottle-the way children clutch a teddy bear. With his Walkman, Swiss Army knife and the liquid more precious than life, Anita dropped him off at the Holiday Inn. I imagine his mouth open, his free arm reaching toward home like a toddler at daycare, his remaining hair flapping slightly on top of his head in the wake left by my godmother's car racing away.

Since that day, he's been kicked out by the management for excessive noise-making, stuck in jail, has wandered the streets, driven drunk and ended up right back at home, banging on the front door until Anita finally let him in. The dog groomer told him never to come back when he arrived, slurring and reeking, to pick up the poodle. That same day he drove drunk to his therapist's office through lunchtime traffic from Marin to Berkeley. She, too, kicked him out of her office, but sent him back on the roads in his inebriated state. No one had the courage to step between him and the wheel. Not even Anita, who gave him back his keys. Maybe each one of them was praying for an accident.

My mother, her husband and I made bets for his inevitable death as soon as we heard about his foolish exploits on the road. The mayhem he might have caused while driving drunk felt like a final blow. Each of us has a different guess as to when he'll go, but no one believes he'll make it through another year. We're tired of looking back on the Jack who used to be. The Jack, in his small windows of sobriety, who interacted with the world, who left the house, did not slur when he gave a speech on the Diamond Sutra or Shakespeare. The Jack you would be proud to introduce to your friends. Now, even the fine long handsome bones of his face (once compared to a young John Lennon) have compressed and crimped and changed shape as if his face is being sucked in through his own nose. He's not in there. He won't look you in the eye anymore when he talks.

At my birthday in August, my husband got up disgusted from a conversation with Jack, saying he couldn't understand a word he said. I was the only one who heard Jack mutter under his breath, "I'm a genius," to the air. I wanted to laugh and remind him that genius requires brain cells, and his are in short supply. Laughing would have made it easier, in the moment.

Jack won't admit that he's an alcoholic anymore. Years earlier, when sobriety still seemed like a viable option, he could admit it to us and to those rooms full of people at AA. Now I can imagine him saying he's living in a suspended state between nothingness and oblivion, or something even more grandiose and pretentious. If it isn't death, it's worse.

Therapy may have failed to help Jack, but Anita seems to be finally making use of it. "I'm thinking of serving him with divorce papers," she told my mom. Which means cutting off the steady supply of money she's provided that has assisted jobless Jack to stay beholden to the bottle and to her for more than a decade. "I always knew if I went to therapy, I'd have to leave him," she told me. "That's why I waited so long."

What stops her from that final step might be what stops all of us from cutting him off completely. We don't know how to break it to him that he's dead already. Sometimes we hope that telling him might provide the final catapult to sobriety, but we also fear that it will smash him into pieces, like one of the old glass empties he used leave lying around their disheveled house. We feel like potential murderers, or at the least like Kevorkian-esque assistants to suicide. We cut him off for a while, but then he lures us back in with a month or two of sobriety, a sixty-day chip from AA; recited Shakespeare sonnets from memory. Usually Anita calls my mom. "He drank again," she'll say. Or sometimes, when she can't bring herself to admit it's happened again, "He's been bad."

I can't help but think it is our indecision that keeps him this way, the family zombie, like some synergistically life-powered embalming fluid we pump into him. Perhaps the longer we stay undecided about helping him or cutting him off, the longer we keep him in that suspension between nothingness and oblivion. The longer we keep him dead.

Even though I know the statistics and the AA rhetoric about Jack's chances of getting and staying sober (i.e., nil), some optimistic chorus of cells in me keeps vigil and I alternate between hope and apathy. He was, after all, my nanny from birth, my self-proclaimed mentor and teacher.

When I was born, my mother's breakfast began with a vodka screwdriver and it was Jack who gave her the time to herself. He and I went to the library, strolled the streets of San Anselmo and listened to opera together. Jack was a parent figure for many years, but one who eventually cracked open the dark side of parenting.

When Jack and Anita moved down to San Diego the year I was thirteen, I began to visit them on spring breaks. Their way of life was hedonistic, laid back and rule-free. They stocked their refrigerator with delicacies my own parents never bought. Jack cooked me Cream of Wheat made with buttermilk, his renowned fried chicken, fresh steak. I drank coke for breakfast and slept in my own room with a window to the ocean. During the day, Jack took me shopping for books and music. It was teenage heaven.

In the room where I slept, Jack kept piles of old comic books. At night I scanned their pages tentatively, making sure the door to my room was locked. I read his Robert Crumb comics, about sex in lewd, explicit variations. They told me something about his nature that I didn't want to know.

The year I turned fifteen, Anita bought me my first bikini despite my adolescent uncertainty. Jack convinced me I looked "really good" in it. We went to the beach the next day and I wore a tee shirt and boxer shorts over the suit. Jack told me I looked like Nastassia Kinski, and said my body was perfect. Despite that it was Paolo at school I wanted to hear these words from, I was flattered. I was fifteen, after all.

That day, back from the beach, it became very apparent that Jack had been drinking heavily. Though the act itself was always hidden from me, probably inside a cup of coffee, or while he was sequestered in the bathroom, my nose gave me the first clue as to what made him seem so different from hour to hour. He didn't even give me time to change out of my bathing suit, but plunked a mammoth copy of The Collected Works of Shakespeare down on our laps. He squeezed himself up against me, and demanded that I read the part of Desdemona. Our faces were mere inches apart; his sweaty thigh was pressed up against my ocean-damp one. Fumes of alcohol escaped his mouth like diesel exhaust as he slurred, tripped and ran words together in an accent created by vodka. I was afraid to get up, heft the gargantuan book off my aching thigh, and put a stop to something that felt like it had the potential to go wrong. I was only fifteen, after all.

I was saved by the sound of Anita's key turning in the lock. Jack scuttled off like the famous hunchback, upstairs to his room. I was left with the stench of his breath and a patch of my thigh that could still feel a distinct hairy prickling where his leg had been.

Memories like these, and fresher ones, like the crush he developed on my best friend Karen when I was nineteen, or the overly-friendly kisses he gave me at Christmas last year, stay with me like dirty thumbprints on a freshly painted wall. I've stopped trying to find things to like about him. He taught me too much about the failings of the human spirit. He told me once that he chose the life of an alcoholic, just to see what it was like, a comment I have pondered for years. What kind of choice is that? My own mother successfully weathered the same disease and has been sober for seven years. What makes one person capable and another the living dead?

With his behavior as dangerous and unpredictable as it's been, lately I've imagined the details of Jack's funeral. We all know that he isn't going to make it much farther than he can toss an empty bottle. I wonder if many people will come, the nature of alcoholism being what it is, or if people will spit on his coffin. I wonder, will I cry? Will I feel guilty for not trying harder to help him, for not loving him properly? What would I say if asked to eulogize him: "Jack spent his life in pursuit of his own death?"

I struggle to make meaning out of his final death before it arrives, to give myself a lesson that Jack might have taught me, if he could have lived a sober life. But it's selfish and untrue to think that Jack entered into his darkness to teach the rest of us how to live. The terrible truth may simply be that there is no meaning at all.

In my family we honor our dead by creating a photomontage of the person's life. When my grandmother passed away four years ago, we had a stunning display of the many stages she passed through in eighty-six years. (Ironically, it's at her funeral that Jack broke a long window of sobriety with drink again). We loved her so much that we photographed her often. I realize that my photographs of Jack stop in the late seventies and hardly comprise a handful, and while I found this strange at first, it hit me as more proof of what I already know: You can't photograph the dead, after all.

Jordan Rosenfeld has dabbled in journalism, flirted with memoir and finds she is inextricably married to fiction. She is in the process of shopping her novel Stranger in the Door to agents, and will continue to write quirky, bizarre, uncomfortable stories so long as she has opposable thumbs. More of her recent work can be found at The Blue Moon Review (www.thebluemoon.com) and Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and at her own website (www.thewritelife.com)."

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It's Saturday morning, but my alarm is beeping like it does every workday. I roll over. Eight o'clock. My heart twitches. In a half hour, the neighborhood garage sale begins.

I hear Pat rummaging around downstairs in the dining room. I jump up, throw on my bathrobe, and sneak downstairs. Best to avoid her until I've at least begun my assigned chores. I tiptoe out the back door, clutching the folding card table under my arm. Brittle autumn leaves crunch loudly under my slippers as I make my way down the driveway.

"Good morning," a stranger hollers from my walkway. "Got any clocks?"

He's looking my way, but is he talking to me? Before I've had my morning coffee? He's wearing a grin that suggests he's supposed to be in front of my house at 8:05 in the morning.

"You're a little early," I grunt.

"I like to get the jump on my competition," he tells me.

"It said in the paper," I begin defensively, "it's not supposed to start until eight thirty."

I put the card table down on the sidewalk and wipe sleep from my eyes. Up and down the block my neighbors file in and out of their houses, hauling furniture, tools, clothes, appliances, all kinds of junk accumulated over untold years. Vapor streams from their mouths as they huff and puff, back and forth in the brisk fall air.

I look at the clock-man as I unfold the table's legs.

"We're not selling any clocks," I tell him.

"I'll pay good money," he insists.

This wasn't the beginning I had in mind for my very first garage sale. For over half a century, I've managed to escape this quaint rite of passage, so I concede there are probably unwritten rules and customs I just don't know. Still, there have got to be limits.

I catch a glimpse of my nearest neighbor and feel a twinge of resentment. After all, she's the one who organized this garage neighborhood sale. The idea sounded pretty funny when I first heard it. But then I discovered she wasn't joking.

My neighbor's front lawn is stocked with her home's entire furnishings. She waves at me quickly, preoccupied with placing stickers on her items. What is she doing, labeling her stuff?

"Any cuckoo clocks?" the clock-man continues. "Grandfather clocks? Any clocks at all? I'd appraise them for you."

"Are you kidding, mister? We use the clocks in our house."
Now I'm beginning to wake up.

The stranger reads my mood. "Good luck," he says with a smirk.

What's that supposed to mean?

After I take out a couple more tables and a few sales items from the garage I decide I've done enough work to greet Pat good morning in the warehouse that used to be our dining room. She's managed to create an empty spot on the table where she's busy writing. She's probably been up since the crack of dawn, and I have no business complaining, but I can't help myself.

"They're showing up already," I hear myself grumble.

"Early shoppers," she says matter-of-factly. How would she know? This is her first garage sale, too.

"But it's not supposed to start until-oh, forget it." I watch her scribbling numbers on stickers. "What are you doing?"

"Writing down my asking prices. You gotta start bargaining somewhere."

Price tags! My God, there's a method to this madness. And everyone seems to know it except me. Well, all I've got to do is last until one-thirty. Four hours or so. I can do that. Hell, I used to play pick-up basketball for that long. This can't be tougher than that.

The next time I go outside, I see cars and trucks lining every inch of curb. A phalanx of women is marching up our driveway and panic strikes. I drop my load of T.V. trays alongside the other odds and ends, and turn to run inside.

"Excuse me!" one of them calls out.

Caught.

"Got any cookie jars?"

Do you see any cookie jars? I want to ask her, but a look at her ripe and eager face urges a gentler course. "None today, I'm afraid."

None today, I'm afraid. Who said that? It's not natural to be pleasant in the morning.

Back inside and half-way through my first cup of coffee, I'm beginning to feel somewhat better - more like myself. Pat comes rushing into the kitchen and waves a wad of money under my nose. "Suitcases are hot. Sold three already. Go down in the basement and see if we've got any more."

I go down into the basement, only half out of my morning fog. I pick up an old, gray suitcase and brush off a thick layer of dust. Wait a minute. Didn't I use this suitcase on my last trip to New York? I put it back on a shelf and take a look around, trying to catalog what I see. I better not find any of this stuff out on the sidewalk!

I go back upstairs and look out the dining room window. Pat's surrounded by shoppers. I'm not about to go out there, so I microwave my cold coffee and sit down to read the paper.

Voices and laughter drift in from outside. The sound of women. Many, many women. When I hear the tenor of a few men, I get up and walk to the window.

I didn't expect to see any men. I look up and down the block. Well, I guess I was wrong. There are some traveling in groups and some paired off with women. I notice one paying Pat for my old fence-post digger. A little later another hands her cash for my old shovel. Then my leaf blower is sold. All the stuff I used when I was younger. Is that a twinge of sadness I feel? Naw! Good riddance to that old stuff!

The crowd in our driveway waxes and wanes with its own mysterious rhythm, but never seems to disappear. A woman walking her dog stops to survey our merchandise. She picks up a spatula and examines it for several minutes. Her dog starts to tug on its chain and I begin to feel sorry for it. I want to shout out the window: "It's a spatula for God's sake, lady!" But I don't.

Isn't that Joe from across the street? What's he doing in our driveway? I duck behind the curtain when he looks toward the house. Isn't he supposed to be stationed in his own driveway, selling his own stuff? My goodness, I think he's buying something. Sure enough, he hands Pat some cash and wheels our daughter's bike across the street and into his garage. I feel as if I've just seen something sinful. Isn't it unnatural for a parent to sell her daughter's toys? Even if she outgrew them a decade ago?

A van arrives and parks in the only available space: right in front of our driveway. A battalion of women disembarks, determined expressions on each of them. They fan out along the block. One of them stops at our table and inspects our wares. She frowns and moves on. Surprisingly, I feel very offended.

I wonder if Pat saw the insult, but she's sipping coffee and talking with another woman. Suddenly, Pat pours the coffee from her mug and the woman hands her some money. Then the woman takes the coffee mug. Our coffee mug! The one with the perfectly curved handle. The mug we bought in San Francisco. The woman leaves before I can decide what to do.

I meet Pat at the front door, poised to defend my property.

"What about those old records?" Pat says, breezing past me.

"You mean my vinyl albums?"

"Yeah. The ones you never listen to."

I begin to feel desperate. "You're not thinking of selling them, are you?"

"People are begging me for 'em. Vintage recordings are all the rage. Who would have known?"

Before I can think of an excuse, she's scampering down the stairs to the basement. "Wait! Wait!" I try to think fast. "I need to go through them first. You know-pick out the ones I want to keep."

"The ones you want to keep?" Her eyes narrow in disbelief. Then her glare eases a bit, softened by a hint of pity.

The doorbell rings. My God, more shoppers on the prowl. I follow Pat back up the stairs and stop at the front door as she proceeds to a throng of women gathered outside by the table.

I can't watch anymore. How can I deal with this? Suddenly, I hear strangers in our backyard. I run to the back window and see several couples inspecting our lawn furniture. Pat is standing beside them, her arms, hands, and mouth moving like a salesman's.

Then it hits me: who's minding the store in the front?

I rush to the front door and see my neighbor handling the sales there. She catches me peeking and announces: "Pat says I get to keep twenty percent of what I sell!"

I glance over at her lawn and see her husband's got their booth covered. There really is a method to this madness.

I hear several sets of footsteps stomping down our basement stairs. My God, they're in the house. I make my way downstairs just in time to witness Pat selling two men the old cot leaning against the shelves with the old suitcases. I don't remember seeing it when I was down there just an hour ago. But I notice the empty space after the men take it up the stairs.

I look up at Pat from the basement. I try to appear pitiful, but I don't think she notices. Instead she jams her hands into her pockets and pulls out two thick fistfuls of bills.

"I haven't counted it yet," she gushes. "But look at all this money. And we weren't even organized! The next time..."

I don't really listen after that. I hope next time I, too, will be better prepared.

Roger Collins is Professor of Education at the University of Cincinnati and has recently begun to write fiction and creative nonfiction in addition to scholarly works. He received that university's Teacher of the Year Award in 1988.

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My feet hurt. I've been standing in line at Kaiser all morning. It's my mother. Her bowels have been acting up for 3 months now. This isn't so bad, except diarrhea tends to throw my mothers blood sugar out of whack. She's diabetic, you know. Then there's her arthritis, so painful she has trouble sleeping at night, not to mention walking, sitting, standing, bending, writing.

Last Sunday, Nikki's bowels went on the lurch in church. Thank the Lord we were sitting in the last Pee-u, if you know what I mean. Croquet on Easter Sunday at Jennifer and Dave's, another blasting of the bowels. My mother's white polyester pants, complete with a sensible elastic waist, dotted with doo doo. This bad bowel behavior is not reserved just for Sunday though. Poor Alice's bathroom, last Tuesday at circle meeting? Yummy yellow turned leopard skin twin. Nikki's depends not so dependable after all. Shit, shit, shit.

I'm waiting now to check Nikki in at the front desk to see the good doctor.

"Uh Oh! Stephie, I have to go to the bathroom."

"O.K. Ma, hold on."

We shuffle to the nearest bathroom as quickly as we can. Our shuffling, not all that quick. Not with arthritis wracking every joint. Worse than the Tin Man before Dorothy oils him. I say 'we' because my mother cannot get her pants pulled down or up by herself anymore. Can't get herself pulled down or up from the toilet without her portable, plastic, toilet riser either. I have to be the riser when we're at Kaiser, church, the movies, because I refuse to haul that nasty old plastic toilet seat everywhere we go. I know she'd like to. She'd like a riser perminente-ly situated on every toilet, world wide. I wish there was some oil for my mom. I'd be happy to oil her up, let her be an 'I' instead of a 'we.' But no, my mom has the needs of a two year old, only she's not as small. If she falls she can't just get up, dust herself off, give her boo-boo a little kiss. If she falls it's pretty much lights out. A broken hip would be the end.

Waiting.....again. Waiting, wishing, not watching. Wishing I had nose plugs. Wishing I had those ear plugs my mother used to make me wear for swimming. Wishing I had some black satin sleep savers over my eyes like Marilyn Monroe. Wishing someone else would watch my mother. Wishing my mother would take care of me. Reversed reality. I hold my breath now, to keep from gagging.

Well, at least the shit didn't sneak out the sides of these dirty old depends onto her practical polyester this time. I won't have to smell shit all the way home in the car. I say 'I' because my mother can't smell anymore.

Now, Nikki waits. Waits for me to wash the cooties off my sensitive, saddened skin. Sterile, stainless steel, silver mirror reflects my face while I scrutinize. Eyes blue, same as Nikki's. Hair, straight, fine, same as Nikki's. This nose, not my mother's. Thank God. Not that Nikki's nose is bad, it's just that I'd like to think there is a little something around here that is not inherited, you know? Not related. Original. These lips my own. The hand in the mirror pulls my hair back to inspect. Maybe I won't turn out like her after all. I'd say I have a 50/50 chance of developing diabolical diarrhea, arthritic affectation, smothered emotions, medicinal devotions. Same as Nikki.

My hand drops, reaches for and turns on the hot water. Dip my hands, drown my hands, let this hot, hot wetness seep into my pores. Skin reddening now. Good. The redder the better. I dump disinfectant into the drowning pool and scrub my heavy heart out. Under my nails, between my fingers, up to my elbows. I could scrub for hours and never get rid of this inevitable situation. My mother is waiting, I am worrying, or am I drowning? My mother, I, we, drowning in whose deterioration?

Across the waiting room sits my mother. Silverwhite. Cotton candy hair. Skin dripping, pulling off her face and bones. Glasses, smudged and smeared atop her nose even though she is reading nothing. Atop her graceful nose that is not like mine. Nikki's nylon bag, the blue one that contains all of her diabetic paraphernalia neatly packed inside, rests on her lap, clutched by gnarled hands that won't lift, grab, or twist anymore. These hands just sit there, on her lap like two small cauliflowers tied up with the blue ribbon strap of her nylon bag. Her white sports socks hug her ankles just above the rim of her Nikes. This woman hasn't run in 45 years, though she was an athlete in her day. Her sensible, elastic waisted pants ride up her legs as if her suspenders were pulled too tight. The skin on her leg peeks out at the cold, coughing, staring waiting room of this Kaiser in Napa.

With that everlasting smile of hers she says, "Hi Stephie."

"You want something to read, Ma?"

"No thank you, I'm fine."

She lifts her veggie hands and struggles to get at something in her bag. I wait. I wait some more. Maybe she can reign victorious, just this once. Three minutes now, she's still trying to untie her bag. Her paw, pecking at the paraphernalia wrapped in blue. One more second I watch.

"Here, Ma, let me give you a hand."

Really, I wish I could give her a hand. I wish I could give her two hands. I wish I could give her ears, eyes, legs, toes.....a husband...some bowel control.

"Oh Stephie, I'm having trouble getting a cough drop out of my bag."

The nurse steps out from behind the institutionalized green, fireproofed door.

"Nikki Oaks, please."

"That's us, Ma."

Standing to attention, I wave to the nurse, she holds the door for us. Poor nurse has no idea that in the time it will take us to get from here to the door she could read , Oliver Twist twice. Leaning over my mother, placing one hand under her arm pit, one at the elbow, my feet braced, spread wide for extra balance, I count, "1...2...3...up." Pulling my mother to standing we wobble. It's a little dangerous, like trying to save a drowning person. You have to be careful they don't take you down with them in their panic.

"Take your time Ma, get your balance."

My mother balances, looks through those smudgy glasses of hers and inches her way towards the door. Squeaking. Nike rubber on shiny linoleum. Shuffle- squeak, shuffle- squeak, shufflesqueaking all that long distance to the door, to the nurse. It's a good thing Nikki has her Nikes. Nikki the last of the long distance shufflers.

Tap...tap....tap....Dr. Vallucci knocks on the door.

"Hello?" The good doctor walks into the small room. White-smocked, clip-boarded, stethoscoped.

"What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Oaks?"

"Well, I seem to be having some trouble with diarrhea lately. It's throwing my blood sugar off."

"Uh Huh." Dr. Vallucci peers over his wire rimmed glasses at my mother. "And how long have you been having this problem?"

"Oh well, let me see....about three months now."

"It says here you're taking Vicodin for your arthritis."

"Yes."

"How many are you taking?"

"Sometimes three a night."

"So, your arthritis is bothering you quite a bit, I take it."

"Yes it is, but the Vicodin is really helping."

"Three a night should stop the diarrhea though. Are you sure you're not taking anything else, Mrs. Oaks?"

"Well...no, just my insulin, my calcium, my vitamins C, D, A&E. "Oh yes, I've been taking Co-Q-10 too. I almost forgot."

"Ah Ha. My guess is that the Co-Q-10 is the culprit here."

"Really, I didn't know."

"Yeah, Ma, I didn't know either. Since when have you been taking Co-Q-10? And where did you get it, anyway?"

Probably since Easter, and I ordered it in the mail. They advertised it on T.V.

Waiting for our prescription in the pharmacy now, #24 flashes on the score board. That's us. I leap from my seat, pick up the Vicodin. You'd think we won the Lottery.

Yahoo, we win, we can go.

It's 11:30, not bad, really. Blood sugar shouldn't plummet yet. We'll get home just in time for another round of insulin, food, sleep.

Driving down Hwy 29, heading back to Sonoma, we pass green rows of grapes spilling over the hills like freshly combed wet hair. Corn flower sky. Cloudless. Pristine. Even the asphalt looks as if it's just had a good scrubbing. Such promise, just like my mother once had, before her life got all tangled up.

My mother's silver white head bobs. A rhythm, a pulse, a breath. Has she passed out? Low blood sugar? Dead? Smudged glasses on her nose still, piggybacking the bobs.

Maybe it's a blessing to lose your eyesight in old age, you know? A master plan of sorts. You don't have to clean your glasses for one. For two, you don't have to see, watch, calculate your own aging process. Blindness, a divine protection. The ultimate shield from witnessing your own body's deterioration. Weak eyes, sheltering a fragile heart. Maybe my mother has witnessed everything she wants to witness in this lifetime.

Back in the driveway now. Thank God we're home. My mother's head still half mast. I shut off the engine, pull the keys from the ignition, look over at my mother sleeping. When did she get old? Which minute, hour, day? I am a witness to this life now, have been for almost 50 years, yet I never really knew when the wrinkles, arthritis, diabetes carved their way into my mother's body. Never saw old age coming. I guess if I knew what was coming I'd run. Take off, like a mouse from a hungry cat. What a coward I am. Snippy if I can't have my own way. I take a deep breath, tap my mother's shoulder.

"Ma, we're home."

"Oh," she lifts her head, smiles the everlasting smile. We sit a moment, my mother looks around the car. "You know Stephie, my drivers license expires in a couple of months. I wonder if I could renew it just by taking the written test, or would I have to take the driving test too?"

She was a good driver back in 1966. Drove all over San Francisco in a brand new red Toyota Corolla, standard transmission. You know, clutching on all the hills. Drove me to college, to my cousins in Danville, to my piano lessons on Mt. Davidson. A regular Mario Andretti.

So, my mother wants to drive again. Last time she drove was fifteen years ago when she drove herself right into a diabetic coma. This possibility is coffined. As in nailed shut, boxed up, buried deep. My words of wisdom, nailed up right along with my mother's possibilities. What is this woman, this mother, this old lady thinking? A driver's test? She can't hold a pen, read through those smudged glasses of hers. Hold a steering wheel? Step on a brake? Not without that magical oil I can't seem to find. Not without some working parts. Not without erasing, oh say, twenty-five years. Does she really think she can get her license renewed?

Low blood sugar waiting behind enemy lines. I look at my mom. My mom looks at me, to me, for an answer. I can't bear to give her the bad news. Instead, I run, like that mouse. "Let's go have lunch now Ma."

Stephanie Marshall is first of all, and always a mother. Other pieces of her puzzled past include art student, seamstress, photographer, waitress, airport shuttle driver, nursing student, art teacher, school teacher, hairdresser, and hot-air balloon ground crew. In 1996 she discovered her dyslexic affinity for words. This is her second appearance in Tiny Lights.

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Fear
By
Joan Leslie Taylor

Tires on gravel. My ears leap at the sound. Fear radiates from my chest, out my arms, down my legs, even my toes are afraid. It is night. I am home alone in my little house in the woods. I listen, poised to hear who may be coming. My heart pounds, my breath goes shallow in my throat, my eyes strain to see unseen danger.

Once, on a warm September evening, tires on gravel . . .

Someone's coming fast up my hill, tires squealing around the hairpin turn, gravel spewing, engine roaring out of control. Ruby barks wildly.

Sideswiping my car, the speeding vehicle makes a sharp left, and crashes into the corner of my house. Wood splinters with a loud crack.

9-1-1. I dial with clumsy fingers. Busy. In the headlights' glare I dial again. The truck maneuvers for a direct hit. Bam! It hits the planter outside the window. The box absorbs the impact. The roaring engine makes it hard to think. 9-1-1. Busy again. Panic rises in my chest like a frantic creature. My tenant is only steps away, but my escape path is blocked by the oncoming truck. Finally, an indifferent dispatcher answers.

"A truck! Hitting my house!" I cry. The creature in my chest has strangled my vocal cords, making my voice thin and high. Ruby's barking hurts my ears. "What's that, Ma'am?" the dispatcher says. He thinks I'm a nut. "A truck . . ." I explain again, trying to sound calm and sane. The truck keeps coming. After each hit, it backs up, then roars forward, battering the planter. A foot thick and full of dirt, it's my protection, but the truck is relentless.

For over a year I struggled to forget that night that replayed itself in my mind.

As the sound of tires below grows louder, fear tightens its grip. The road divides before my hill, other driveways snaking off into the woods. I listen, listen. Was a car accelerating up the hill, or turning? Probably a neighbor. No need to fear. My heart races, blood roars to my chest, leaving my fingers numb and cold, my feet cemented to the floor. My breath is shallow, quick. My head swims. I struggle to know what is real.

I'm caught in the headlights. Like an animal, I freeze, clutching the receiver, my only hope. I move out of the truck's path, as far as the tether of the phone cord allows.

"What's happening?" the dispatcher asks, still unconvinced. "The truck is destroying the planter. There's only glass after that!" How can I convince him? "What kind of vehicle?" he asks. I see only lights. "A pick-up, maybe."

Then, with a splintering of wood, a shattering of glass, the truck breaks through. Like a tank, it rolls over the rubble and into the room, pushing along moist soil and a snarl of torn plants. "The truck is in my house!" I shout. "In the house?" At last I hear alarm in his voice.

"Please. Help me," I whimper.

I have never in my life whimpered. I am a woman long accustomed to living alone. I have always moved through my fears, I am not easily cowed. "Fear is not a reason to be deterred," I used to assert. Now I know true fear, not neurotic worry. It is a force of nature beyond the reach of rational thought or will. There's no moving through this. I am powerless, my muscles useless. "Paralyzed with fear," is not just a figure of speech. When the fear comes, I cannot move, I can barely breathe. I can only wait, as I did that night, hoping to survive.

I peer over the half-wall between kitchen and living room to survey the devastation. A dark truck is halfway inside. Pieces of window and wall hang over the cab. The scent of moist earth intermingles with automotive smells of rubber and exhaust. In the silence, I hear the tick, ticking of the engine cooling. Has the key been turned, or has it died in the final crash, leaving the driver dead? "What's happening now?" the dispatcher prompts.

Out of the driver's window, a white forearm unfolds, like a corpse rising from the grave. Horrified, I watch the disembodied hand push aside debris. The driver emerges, and steps through the wreckage. "It's my former tenant, Tim Harman!" I exclaim. "Can you spell that?" he responds, pleased to have a fact.

Tim and I stare at each other. A quiet, slight-built man in glasses, depressed and aimless, but always polite, he'd lived next door just eight months when I gave him notice. He hadn't been a terrible tenant, but he made me uneasy and when I had a chance to rent the cottage to a friend, I leapt at the chance. In slow motion, Tim walks toward me, his eyes wild. Kicking furniture aside, he grabs a heavy candlestick. I duck, as it hits the wall above me. He reaches over the half-wall, grabs the kettle off the stove, flings it at me. Pottery crashes around me.

I imagine running out the backdoor. But how far could I get, myopic without glasses, barefoot in the dark, pursued by a madman? I cling to the phone, watch helplessly as Tim comes toward me. I see in his eyes he will kill me.

Yet I did not die. Improbable as it was to have a truck in my house, still more wildly impossible was the sight of someone climbing over the truck, flying through the air to land on my attacker from behind. A visitor next door risked his life to save mine. I watched the two men struggle for an eternity of minutes until police arrived, swirling lights atop their cars illuminating my woods with mercy.

In the initial days I floated euphoric, amazed to find myself alive. Barely comprehending the damage to my home, I didn't yet know I myself had been changed. Men came with shovels to clear away the rubble, and plywood was put up to keep out raccoons. I assured hovering friends I was fine, that Tim was safely in jail, but as darkness fell, fear perched on my shoulder, crept into my throat. I sat trembling behind the plywood, unable to see out, every sound magnified. Ruby and I stirred each other's fears. She'd bark at some sound and look to me for reassurance. I'd stare, rigid with fear, so she'd bark more loudly, escalating my fear.

I once read about the amygdala, that ancient part of the brain designed to deal with immediate danger, like advancing saber-toothed tigers. At the first hint of danger, the amygdala floods the brain with hormones. Heart rate, blood pressure increase. Large muscles prepare for action. The amygdala triggers a response before the neo-cortex, the thinking part of the brain, even registers peril. The brain is wired to react without delay. Thinking things over would have allowed humankind to die out in the time of saber-toothed beasts. After one incident, the amygdala sends its hormone-laden message whenever the stimulus appears. For me, all it takes is a benign crunching of tires on gravel that others wouldn't even hear.

Two weeks after the incident, it was a relief to leave my home, a prison of terrible imaginings, on a long planned trip. One night, 3000 miles away, I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. Instantly, I was inhabited by terror. My mind told me this was irrational, that I was far from danger. But the one-trick-pony amygdala had done its job. Waves of fear swelled through me. No reason to be afraid. But reason has no power over fear. I trembled as it rampaged through me. Despair followed the ebb of fear. Would I always be like this, shackled to fear, quivering at sounds in the night?

Soon my home was repaired, all signs of the terrible evening erased. The broken window was replaced, the fireplace rebuilt, the floor refinished. All was like new, except for my fearful heart, its scars not so easily removed.

At first, friends checked on me, but soon I was left alone. I was embarrassed to still be afraid. Everyone thought I was "over it," but fear shadowed me. I lived in unwilling intimacy with dread and terror, panic and horror. When I'd hear tires on gravel, it would be as if no time had passed, and I'd be swamped with terror. I became attuned to the ways of fear: the clenching in my chest that rose into my throat, gripped my face and eyes, then descended in a leaden mass into my belly and turned my legs to granite. I grew familiar with how dread shimmied over the scalp, crawled across skin. I inhaled the breath of the jittery creature in my chest. Each cell of my body, every synapse in my brain, was battered. For more than a year I was invaded like this, not every night, but when it came, I'd be left as debilitated as the first time, anxious and bruised.

I became afraid of fear. It was so powerful I believed it might destroy me. Only gradually I began to understand I'd survive, that no matter how terrible, fear could not kill me. If I tensed, resisting its onslaught, it would sear every cell as it passed through, and its grip would endure. As if caught in heavy surf, I learned to let it wash over me. Like the ocean, it was less damaging if I went with it. I surrendered myself to fear, knowing it would inevitably deposit me on the safe shore, and I'd soon be watching its receding back. Watching fear was like watching my breath in meditation.

As the date of Tim's release approached, the fear increased. I kept watching and waiting. I considered a gate at the bottom of my hill, but a gate symbolized giving in, allowing Tim to steal my freedom, to put me behind bars.

One night I rose from the couch to make a cup of tea. Standing in the kitchen, I heard a car on the gravel below and felt the familiar fear begin. This time it was as if I were slightly outside myself, looking back at where I'd been sitting, observing myself on the cusp of fear. I could go with this. . . or not. A choice. Fear was still a terrible force, but I was no longer entirely helpless.

But what if Tim and came after me again when he got out of prison? The sobering thought of this possibility poured into me. I'd never looked all the way to this worst-case prospect. Surprisingly, I felt relief. Yes, Tim could kill me, but my life had been rich and happy, so if this was how I'd die, well, okay. I fully intended to live on into my old age, but I saw how I could be a diligent good girl, meticulous with every last precaution, and now or someday, I would die. But only once. I had been afraid thousands of times. Because I loved being alive, I'd do what I could to protect myself, but the time and circumstances of my death were very little in my power.

I have completed my time with fear. For now. I've cleared away the illusions of safety and control to see my death waiting comfortably for me at the very end of my life. In the meantime - however long or short that might be - I shall live at peace in my house in the woods. I will not erect a locked gate.

Joan Leslie Taylor is a business advisor and coach who lives in the peaceful woods of Pocket Canyon. She loves working with entrepreneurs and then retreating from the world of commerce to follow her own muse. Joan is the author of a book about her experiences as a hospice volunteer, as well as a number of short stories and essays.

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Tiny Lights' 2002 Contest Judges:

Leslie Cole is a Sonoma County writer and teacher who keeps more than one demon at bay with trips to the movies and swims in the ocean. She has been published in the Northern California Bohemian's Jive contest, and her short story, "A Conversation About Green Water," is included in the anthology, Seductions.

Clara Rosemarda is a writer, counselor and Buddhist meditator who teaches creative writing as one road toward consciousness (and publication). A member of the Sebastopol Center for the Arts' Literary Arts Council, she co-coordinates the Writer's Sampler lecture series. Her work has been published in Sonoma Poets Collection II, Tiny Lights and the forthcoming anthology, Steeped: In the World of Tea.

Jane Love is honored to judge for Tiny Lights, where her first published personal essay appeared. Events coordinator for Copperfield's Books, an independent bookstore chain, and the editor of the literary magazine, The Dickens, she has a new essay, "Mahoning River Reflection," coming out with Pig Iron Press.

Guy Biederman  teaches at Santa Rosa Junior College and the College of Marin, as well as at his infamous Barndo (think zendo or dojo for writers) in Sebastopol. He is master of the genre he calls Low Fat Fiction, and publishes Bust Out Stories, a magazine of short shorts.

Don MacQueen's letters regularly appear in Boonville's Anderson Valley Advertiser.  If you're lucky, you might find yourself on the mailing list for his pithy publication, In Other Words. Don says he is clueless why he gets low when the Giants lose and high when they win; takes this as one of the many indicators that his life has been a role in some vast and opaque play.