The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": child free friends

Monday, November 10, 2008

Those Without Teens

On Sunday, a friend of mine, or a woman I used to know, stopped by my house. We are around the same age, and we briefly attended the same college. She found me on the Internet, and said she would be in the area. I felt obligated to invite her - I'm not sure why I felt obligated since I never

a) really knew her well and

b) never really liked her all that much.

Anyway, let's call her Agatha since that name suits her. Agatha is unmarried, child-free (this is my understanding of the new politically correct term for the sane), and has become something of a self help group junky. I sort of knew this from her holiday cards, but when she was there, in the flesh, it occurred to me that Agatha and I had about as much in common as Iceland and Somalia. She sat on my couch while three cats dozed in chairs and our gassy German shepherd wagged her tail. She was gassy because there is a bog near our house with these wonderfully graceful geese and Mazy had dined on goose poop during her previous night's walk. You can imagine the fragrance. (I did put the dog in the laundry room. Hey, I've got some manners left).

Agatha wanted to talk.

Talk?

My husband works all day Sunday and we had two kids in the basement who were there because of serious trouble at home, plus my own three kids, and a month long houseguest from Malaysia. I put coffee on and tried to listen to Agatha's long, dusty stories about restaurants she had gone to in Italy, Germany and France. It seemed all the art and attractions in Europe had been replaced by restaurants.

"It's difficult to talk in this house," she said with sort of an edge.

I nodded. "There are kind of a lot of us here today."

"I could never do this," she said, "it's crazy with the phone and all these kids. Have you thought about why your life has gotten this way?"

I could feel the presence of invisible self help people gathering around Agatha, ready to assess my life.

"I guess choices," I said, pointedly glancing at the microwave clock. "Would you like any more coffee?"

HINT, HINT, HINT!!!!

"Love some," she said.

So I braced myself and put more coffee on.

Agatha was sitting in the living room when Philip walked past. "Hey, dude," he said to Agatha. The look on her face made her visit bearable.

"That's your son?"

"One of them."

"You heard him call me dude?"

"That's how they say hello."

"When I was a teenager, I never would have addressed ANY of my parents' friends that way. Never."

"Huh." But I said this particular "huh" in such a way that it could easily have been confused with a swear word.

Agatha looked at his snake bites, at his sagging pants, at the casual way he came over and put his arm around me. "Canya set me up with some juice, Mom?"

She watched him in the same manner I imagine Margaret Mead once watched the Samoans.

"Well," she said finally.

We said a stiff goodbye at the door without any promise of seeing one another again. I think Agatha had had enough of me for a life time.

"God, who was that angry lady?" my oldest guy asked. (He hadn't even give her a "hey dude").

"I went to school with her once. We used to be a little friendly. Kind of friends."

"With her? And you say we make bad choices in our friends."

"I don't think she'll be back too soon," I assured him. "This is all too messy for her."

"I thought the house looked pretty good," he said.

"I don't mean that..." then I saw the look on his face, and I knew he had understood what I meant. He had understood exactly. How could he not? He was part of our shared mess.

But I mean, really, what's not to love when you see this at the breakfast table? (Even if breakfast is at 11:30?)---

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***