Nonfiction

I was barefoot running across a cricket field. A woman in a red headband grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward a pen filled with cute black puppies. “Half Saint Bernard, half Man,” she explained. She said it was a new breed and tried to sell me on the perks. Much smarter than a regular dog. Still snuggly, just more opinionated. Less of a pet, more of a peer. 

I woke up to the sound of the ceiling fan whirring overhead. I was on vacation in Perth, where I used to live, and where it was summer in January. 

Over coffee, I told a friend about the dream. “Sounds pretty disturbing,” she said. I told her that maybe one of the dogmen would escape but sadly wouldn’t be able to live free from exploitation. “Like Daryl Hannah in Splash,” she said. Outside the café was a large poodle mix tied to a parking meter. 

After saying goodbye, I decided to walk through my old neighborhood. It had been eighteen months since I lived in the brick house with the long corridor and broken bathroom mirror. I inferred from the car in the driveway and the punching bag on the porch that the house was occupied. Standing in the harsh sun, I waited for someone to appear. I could have knocked, but what would I have said? This is where I used to live? And then what? Was I expecting to be invited in to see my old house without my television, my high-speed blender, my children? 

A few days later when I returned to the house, I noticed the overgrown weeds. A fly briefly entered my mouth which caused me to cough. I kept coughing, in hopes someone would hear me and open my old front door. No one did.

The third time I walked by the house was my last day in Perth. The car was gone but the windows were open. On my tiptoes I could see bathing suits drying on the clothesline near where I once observed one spider capture another. Something shiny in my peripheral vision caught my attention. There on the sidewalk, sitting upright, was a lone, round Christmas ornament. I leaned over to pick it up. Covered in silver glitter, it sparkled in the sun and felt like sandpaper on my palm. This is not my house anymore, I thought. I put the shiny ball in my purse and walked away. Later that night, I tucked it in my suitcase between bars of chocolate and a pair of red socks. The ball now sits on a shelf in the kitchen, in my home in San Francisco. My children were born in this house. Half him, half me. 

I entered a 53-word story contest and convinced myself I would win. I did not win.

This is not the first time I have deluded myself. I once applied to Stanford Business School and was shocked when I didn’t get in.  At first, I assumed it was a mistake, that my name must have ended up in the wrong pile. After rereading the letter several times, I understood that, in fact, there was no mistake. I thought about writing the university a rejection letter. We received hundreds of rejection letters, and unfortunately, yours was rejected. Rebecca looks forward to attending Stanford this fall.

I suggested to my daughter that she run for office at her middle school. She has lots of ideas about how students can learn more, and how teachers can share classes. She asked me if I ever ran for anything and I told her I ran for sixth-grade president with the catchy slogan, Handler Can Handle The Job. I have clear memories of making campaign posters and taping them to the gym wall, but I do not remember the election result. Both she and I find that odd. 

In my twenties, I was a waitress at Legal Seafood in Boston. I sold the most bluefish and won a brunch at the Ritz-Carlton. I brought my dad. He was very proud of all the bluefish I had sold. When we clinked our mimosa glasses together, he leaned in and asked, “How’d you do it?” I told him what I had told the customers. That the bluefish was the freshest fish that day, and that they shouldn’t bother with anything else. After brunch, Dad and I smoked cigars on Newbury Street and he asked me more questions. 

Many years ago, I tried to win a trip to Australia. A local radio station was holding a contest that involved quickly translating Aussie slang into American English. Dog & Bone equals telephone, that kind of thing. I made it to the finals, and my time slot was immediately following the funeral of my husband’s grandfather. While grieving guests were in the living room swapping stories, I was hunkered down at the kitchen table furiously trying to remember if knackered meant drunk or tired. I did not win. 

Recently I bought some almond milk that tasted off. I wrote to the company and one week later I had coupons for two free bottles.

This is my 53-word story inspired by the assigned theme, majority:

The raven-haired girl asked the new boy, “Truth or Dare?” The boy fiddled with his shoelace while the other children giggled in anticipation. “Truth,” he whispered. She sneered, “Do you want to kiss every girl in this room?” He raised his eyes and stared bravely into her beady blue daggers. “Most,” he replied. 

A former white nationalist is sitting at the table next to me, reaching for a miniature fruit tart. I want to tell him he is a goddamn motherfucker and doesn’t get to eat a miniature fruit tart. But I am at an anti-racism event and this man is no longer part of the white nationalist movement. He is now trying to help. He reformed because in college he made friends with Jews who presented him with research that showed that white people are not smarter than anyone else and holy shit is he reaching for a second fruit tart? 

I drive home from this strange event and my stomach hurts. I stop at the Middle Eastern grocery store to buy some beans and hummus and the woman at the counter asks me how my day is going. I tell her that I am having a strange day. She asks why and I tell her about the reformed white nationalist. She peers at me over her reading glasses, and says, “Can someone change that much?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He was homeschooled by racists so he was basically raised in a cult.” My voice trails off and I feel my stomachache return. 

“I don’t think he can change. No way.” 

I pay for my food. “I guess I like to think that people can change.”

“Maybe like someone who used to be allergic to peanuts. But not a racist.” She sighs and hands me a receipt. “Do you need a bag?”

I shake my head. “The whole thing made me feel weird.”

She laughs. “That’s because it is weird.” 

I go home and eat carrots and hummus while finishing up something for work. There is an email from the event organizer. Thank you for helping move the conversation forward. And then something about talking about things is better than not talking about things. 

A hummingbird is outside my window, fluttering in place. Its brightly colored feathers make me think of the delicate miniature fruit tarts, and the way his mouth opened and closed around them. 

Even before you said, “I can’t move their cheese too fast,” I suspected you might be someone who lacks self-awareness. You are on the phone at a café and your voice is too loud. 

I am trying to read the news. A sixteen-year-old girl with Asperger’s is angry about adults’ disregard for the environment. She travels by boat. 

I think about asking you to stop talking so loudly but instead run through a variety of scenarios. You might be hard of hearing. You might be under a lot of pressure. It is important you keep this client otherwise your business will dissolve. Your husband has cancer and this is a brief moment away from his bedside. All of your friends died in a van accident. You need this money. You are running out of money.

This café charges five dollars for a latté. 

You slam your fist on the table to emphasize your point, and I wish you would take up less space.

Grown men are angry at this Swedish girl for loving the planet. Her straightforwardness has touched a nerve. She must be a poster child for the left-leaning liberals. She has braids for goodness sake. Braids!

You have now used the expression “pressure points” four times in the last 15 minutes. You look up from your laptop to glance at a younger man who has just entered the café on an electric unicycle. You don’t seem alarmed by the man ordering an oat milk cappuccino while balancing on a circus apparatus. Adults have confiscated all the toys in this city. Where are the children?

Recently I admitted to a friend that I find it hard to get worked up about the environment when there are homeless people and guns. She said she couldn’t talk about global warming without crying. I told her I felt ashamed. Since then, I have wondered why I never cry thinking about the planet. I don’t even get choked up. In fact, I go days without thinking about greenhouse gases and the increase in tropical storms. 

I wonder what you think about climate change. Maybe you are in the business of saving the planet. Your booming voice might have an opinion, and I might ask you about it if you weren’t on the phone. Or, we could beat our chests, walk on our knuckles, steal all the unicycles, and ride off the edge of the world.

“The girl was brought to school with very little paperwork, by her great-grandmother, who was showing signs of dementia.”

We leaned in, clutching our jars of water, wanting to know more. We were at Book Club, but as usual, the conversation had veered in another direction, because we stalk stories like hunters.  

“She was non-verbal for several years. She wears a big bow in her hair, like a girl from another century.”

The water was served to me in a jar because we were at Helen’s house, and her home has houseplants, beautiful art, homemade galette, and water served in jars. Tonight, there were also tiny cucumbers that looked like dollhouse watermelon. 

“She sometimes gets angry and throws things. The school’s emergency plan is that the teacher takes the other students out of the room and leaves the girl alone. Then someone comes in to talk to her.”

I held my breath for a few seconds too long and coughed. That morning I had seen a coyote gnawing on a squirrel, and now the day was ending with another strange story. 

The girl was instructed to finish a sentence that started with, “If I had wings.” She wrote, “If I had wings, I would fly everywhere and look for my mom who is living in a car.”

I could have been a girl who didn’t speak, who wore bows in her hair, and ripped a television off a wall in her classroom. I could have been the smallest cucumber, or a great-grandmother with dementia. I could have been a squirrel minding my own business. I could have been a winged superhero, locating all the mothers living in cars. 

Instead I am a person in a book club with women who drink Sauternes and talk about resilience. What will happen to this girl, we wondered, and decided it could go either way. Our silence was a collective prayer. A prayer for the great-grandmother, that she will hold on long enough to see this girl through. A prayer for the girl to learn to live with her anger. A prayer for more nights like this one. 

The carpet in the San Mateo Marriott Airport Hotel is a pattern of geometric beige and grey shapes, impervious to dirty loafers and rolling suitcases. Someone designed this carpet, I think as I rush through the lobby. This shall be our carpet, someone declared. 

I am late to the conference. The marching band is finishing a pump it up number, as I enter the back of the banquet hall, balancing a side plate of mini-croissants and sliced cantaloupe atop my conference program, scouring the room for an open seat. I find one in the back between a short man with dreadlocks and a woman on her laptop with a spreadsheet open and a pencil behind her ear. The nametag hanging around my neck is attached to a green lanyard. Most other people seem to have blue or red lanyards. Perhaps I signed up for the vegetarian lunch. I look down at my kangaroo leather boots and try to recall which meal preference I stated.  

It is sweltering outside but inside it is conference weather, drafty from the air conditioning. I am wearing a sleeveless dress and regret forgetting to bring a conference shawl. Everyone else in the room is in long sleeves except for one woman in a sleeveless navy dress with a spider web tattoo covering her shoulder. 

This is my first conference in four years. Well that’s not true. I attended a bloggers conference in Perth where I learned I didn’t want to be a blogger. I wanted to be a writer. 

As a woman with a news anchor haircut officially welcomes us to the conference and reviews the day’s schedule, I polish off the mini-croissants and contemplate returning to the buffet for a yogurt cup. Instead I open my program and circle the workshops I plan on attending. 

I spot a colleague across the room. I text him, Hi I can see you. I see him check his phone and look around. Finally he sees me and waves. He is in a blue lanyard. 

A woman at my table (red lanyard) gets up and leaves behind a pink notebook. The cover reads, in cursive, A Place For Your Dreams. Soon she is back with coffee and two apricot pastries.

It is freezing in here. Many years ago I attended a fundraising conference where the keynote speaker was a man with a disability who climbed Mount Everest. I do not remember his disability but I remember some of his slides made me feel very cold. 

The first clue that this is not a fundraising conference is it is quieter. Also there are more men.

The workshops are surprisingly good. One of them is about storytelling as persuasion, and my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears when the communications consultant in the black jumpsuit says, “Especially in turbulent times, stories can save us.” She has smoky eye makeup and elegant arm movements that make it look like she is gently scooping up her audience. She tells us humans are narrative animals. She says Martin Luther King said I have a dream, not I have a pie chart. 

This is an example of using humor at a conference. 

In another workshop, a woman asks too many questions that aren’t actual questions (red lanyard), and I want to say something but remind myself I am not in charge of this room. 

At lunch I join my coworkers at a round table with cloth napkins and two breadbaskets. We swap stories about the sessions we just attended. Who knew the mayor of Stockton was so dynamic, one of them says. I notice I am happy to be with these people. We are a team, I think, as I unwrap a butter patty. 

Men in black serve us grilled chicken with sides of cooked carrots and mashed potatoes. The lanyard colors didn’t mean a thing. I shiver and dig in.