Tag: Friends

Density (3)

BettyLeave a comment

I didn’t tell my father I had been hit by a car until my arm began to hurt. I wasn’t trying to be strong; I just didn’t want to hear him nag. 

The car came from behind. Erica and I walked on the right side of the road, the side we always walk on, I on the outside and she inside. We were talking about something – boys, jobs, my frustration with both – familiar conversation on a familiar road, when suddenly a tremendous force struck my left arm and sent me tumbling violently to the ground. I groaned and was dazed – it didn’t occur to me that I had been hit by a car until a split second later when I turned to see the car speeding down the road. I heard Erica saying, “Oh my god, oh my god,” then when she registered what had happened, screaming, “Hey! HEY! GET BACK HERE!” 
In my dazed state I remember looking up at her from the ground thinking, “I wish she would lower her voice,” as it was late and the neighborhood, being filled with elderly folk, was mostly half asleep.
 Erica bent down, her voice now quieter and more hurried, more worried, “Oh my God, Betty. Betty. Are you okay? Where does it hurt? Don’t move.”
I didn’t know. I groaned because I was confused. Everything hurt and nothing hurt. Even though it was dark, I closed my eyes because it helped me concentrate – I had read something about trauma and how adrenaline or shock can trick you into feeling fine and moving what you shouldn’t be moving. One bone at a time, the article had said. I wiggled my toes. I moved my knees. I tapped the fingers of my right hand, bent my arm at the elbow, rolled my shoulder, my neck and with my right hand, felt my head. I saved my left arm for last because I was terrified that it was shattered but that I just hadn’t registered it. I didn’t look at it. It felt numb. But slowly, very slowly, the sensation came back and I could feel the tips of my fingers – though the left tips felt noticeably duller than the right. But the fact that I could move them – it meant my bones were fine. Nothing was broken.
I got up slowly, then turned my neck left and right. All good. My legs worked fine. And finally the arm. The left arm I let stay at my side – I didn’t want to shock the liquefied muscle. Erica stood by and watched silently, shocked that I was standing.
“Betty,” she said, “maybe you should sit down.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“No. I think you hit your head.”
“I most certainly did not hit my head.”
“I think you did. You can’t always tell when you have a concussion…and then sometimes people just go to sleep and never wake up. Like Natasha Richardson.” Even in the dark, I could sense her worry, “Please sit down. I’ll get your parents.”
“Erica. I’m fine.”
We finished the walk and at the door, I assured Erica I wouldn’t die in my sleep. There were too many things I had to do. Like check my email.
An hour later, I sat at my brother’s desk, wondering how odd it was that I’d just been hit by a car. My parents had greeted me at the door and asked me how the walk went.
“Fine,” I said, “Great.”
And I went to the computer. I sat and typed something, deleted it, then as my thumb pressed the space bar a sharp pain shot up my left arm. I ignored it and continued writing, but the pain came back stronger and stronger until suddenly, I was fearful of moving any part of my left arm.
I looked at my watch. It had been exactly an hour since I’d been hit – wasn’t my response to the pain a tad too delayed? I imagined a hairline fracture splitting and splitting and the bone finally cracking in two an hour later. Is that what was happening now?
I suddenly had to know. I thought about my grandmother enduring severe constipation and stomach pains, not wanting to “bother” her children with her petty digestive issues until one day there was so much blood in her stool she was frightened. The diagnosis was a minute away from colon cancer and she ended up having a giant segment of her intestine removed.
I wasn’t going to be so stupid. A little nagging was a fair trade for having my father drive me to the hospital, as my left arm was in no condition now to turn a steering wheel.
I walked slowly into the dining room, where my mother sat typing away at her laptop. My father was in the kitchen, within view and earshot.
“Mom, dad,” I said slowly.
“Hm?”
“I have to tell you something, but please don’t freak out.”
My father stopped chopping the scarlet watermelon. My mother looked up from the laptop. Their worry thickened the air.
“I got hit by a car when I was walking.”
My mother gasped. My father put down the butcher’s knife with more force than was necessary. He walked slowly into the dining room, as though walking in too quickly would shatter me. He looked me up and down.
“What? Where? Where does it hurt? Are you bleeding? Who? Who? Did you get the license plate?”
I told them what happened, emphasizing that only my arm hurt – and on the arm, only my tricep…but the pain was increasing and I feared I had a fracture.
“We’ll go to the hospital right away,” my father said, and in the car and in the emergency room, I had to hear it: the long, drawn out “I told you so” about walking with a flashlight or a reflector vest. It was an old warning, often heard, never heeded.
“I’d rather walk in asphalt camouflage,” I’d say.
He’d shake his head, “Once is all it takes.”
And it’s true. Once is all it takes.
On the drive to the hospital I studied my father’s headlights and the area they covered – there was no way the driver did not see me. Perhaps he was inebriated and had slow reflexes. I imagined how – or how I hoped – he felt: filled with remorse. Hitting a pedestrian and driving away. Did he think I was a garbage can? I had bounced loudly off the side of his passenger side car door – a discovery I made later in the bathroom when I discovered a chunk of skin missing from my left hip. I wonder if the thud rang in his head as he tried to sleep that night, not knowing if it was a garbage can or a human. Either way, he had left something toppled over on the side of the road.  
We drove quietly with the Chinese radio playing softly in the background – my father driving jerkily, as though he couldn’t decide between speeding up or slowing down. I held my arm gingerly – trying not to think about the pain and worrying if I would have energy to go into work the next morning. My father finally spoke.
“He didn’t stop at all?”
“No.” I thought about the noise I heard, “I think he sped up.”
My father grunted. I turned to see his face glowing in the dim light of the dashboard and brightened intermittently by the pale yellow street lights we drove past. There were bags under his eyes. He seemed even more tired than I, but here he was, driving me to the ER at midnight. His expression was more disturbed than I had seen it in a while – in fact, he seemed angry.
“Look Bah,” I said, “I know I’m stupid. I should have been holding a flashlight or wearing a reflector vest. I will start walking with both.”
He snorted, “I’m going to buy you a neon reflector body suit. But you didn’t get a license plate? Nothing? Did you see him at all?”
I wondered why he was asking me – I had told him already. I didn’t see anything that could help me identify the driver – just the car from a distance as he sped down the hill and then nothing.
“No, Bah. I didn’t see anything.”
“He just drove away?”
“Yes!” exasperation crept into my voice, “He just drove away! What do you want me to do? I wasn’t exactly in a position to go and chase him down.”
My father shook his head.
“Dad, are you okay?”
 “Okay?” The car swerved slightly, “Of course I’m okay! I didn’t get hit by a car! But I didn’t just raise a perfectly good daughter for 26 years so that some….some… (and here my father said something quite shocking – a Chinese expletive I have no idea how to translate)… could run her over!”
I wonder if I had gotten a license plate or even a vague description, what my father would do. I don’t know. He is not vengeful, but I had never had occasion to see my father act protective. So charmed is my life. He is nearing his mid-sixties, which nowadays is not so old, but at that moment I sensed a strange desperate helplessness. True, HE was driving me to the hospital, not the other way around, but I felt sorry, suddenly, that I had brought this unnecessary stress upon him. How could I take care of them if I didn’t even have the sense to walk at night with a flashlight? But it was the light- the sallow, dingy yellow of the streetlamp that cast more shadows on my father’s face than necessary. It was the light and the time of night and the fact that he was driving me to the ER, something he had never done, and something he hoped he would never have to do again. 

I was still conscious and in one piece, still healthy, but we both knew it had been a close call. An inch closer to the left and I’d have been paralyzed, my spine the central point of impact. Now behind the wheel, he was in control. But there were times during which his daughter, under her own simple volition, would climb too high and out of his reach or step into a darkness into which he (and a others) could not see. 

Thanks, Giving

Betty1 Comment

In kindergarten, we were asked, the day before Thanksgiving, to outline our tiny palms on orange construction paper. I remember removing my hand and seeing what my teacher promised would be a turkey and what a turkey it was! We were instructed to color in the lines of our fingers to represent the turkey’s plumage and to give the turkey a face and legs. Carefully with a brown crayon, I drew a wing, a crooked smile, and spindly turkey legs. With a black crayon, I gave it beady-eyed sight. A rudimentary leering bird: a child’s take on a symbol of gratitude.

That was the easy part, not necessarily the art.

On the back there were printed words followed by blank lines: “I am thankful for….”

Gratitude as a concept was rather foreign to me. As a four year old with strong opinions and a sense of self (which would sadly, come and go), I thought I grasped how the world worked. My relationships were simple and so was my life. School, Chinese school, screaming and yelling with my cousins took up the bulk of my time, along with the occasional spanking which resulted in more screaming and yelling.

I doubt I propped my elbows up on my preschool desk and twirled my black crayon in a thoughtful way. I doubt I asked myself: “What am I thankful for? A very good question indeed.”

What happened, (despite my memory being notoriously poor, I am certain this is 99% accurate) is I simply looked around to what my classmates were so furiously scribbling and saw the words, “Mommy”, “Daddy,” “Brother,” “Dog” and other generic words that compose a child’s world being scrawled out in illegible child’s script.

So I followed suit. Not because I was a lemming, but because my classmates reminded me then that “Hey, these bozos have the right idea! I am kinda grateful for my dad, my mother (even though she uses the belt) and my brother, (who saves me from the belt). These people/things are to be grateful for.”

An early lesson in gratitude.

Normal Rockwell Freedom from Want 1943 The Normal Rockwell Museum

Now two decades later I don’t have to think about it anymore because they are always on my mind. Give me the blank lines again and I’ll give you a book.

I am thankful for……

Family.
Friends.
My job and the smiling faces (and kind-hearted reprimands) that come with it, and all the other jobs I’ve had, never for the paycheck (because for many years there was never a paycheck) but for the stories.
Life in general, for more stories.

 And most importantly, because this medium commands it, I am grateful for you literate and “very highbrow” people who make time in your busy days to read my blog. Because writing a blog no one reads is like dancing alone – which on certain days can be just the right amount of fun – but usually, it is better with company.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Ode on a Friend Named Courage, 2

Betty1 Comment
Courage could not help herself from falling. Who can? Well some people… no, no. Everyone falls; the difference lies in how you soften your landing. Many of our friends are masters of their emotions. They hold on tight to words, smiles, hugs and tears, locking them inside that fist-sized muscle and only release them with a four letter combination. And even then, they must be careful.
“I never say I love you first.”
“I’ll never admit I want him back.”
“I’d rather die than call him first.”
 Courage and I have spent enough hours analyzing people both broken and whole to know that this is, in some twisted way, the formula: to win someone’s love, you hold back your own. It’s a strange game we’re both terrible at playing and which we’ve lost many times, despite all the literature. I lost first in high school, when I asked the object of my affection point blank: “Darling, why don’t you like me?”
“Because you’re creepy,” he said coldly.
Lesson learned. Disclosure invites disclosure, which is sometimes not what one wants to hear. I haven’t played since.  

From that day I loved from behind the veil of friendship. There was my own Golden Boy, then The Old Professor, then The Focused Genius, my relationships with them all variations on a theme: close, but platonic. Adoring, but distant. I never took the leap. Did not dare to. Why would I, and risk losing a friendship, even if said friendship was born upon the hopes of love? 


Courage agreed and we drew up a plan like two fat girls embarking on a newfangled diet. Yes, yes, everything in moderation. We would use time, gestures and looks as measuring cups and parse out our affections and affectations – what can be said and when. Too soon? Fall back, retreat. Plot. Design. Scheme. Yet a year and a half after meeting The Golden Boy, Courage forgot the rules and fell off the wagon. She had a taste of some treat – a smile, a whisper, a tantalizing hint of some greater feeling waiting to be peeled back and inflated – and released the archetype she had always embodied, even before she was Courage: ladies and gentlemen, I give to you The Romantic Idealist. And to make matters worse, at her core, the Romantic Idealist’s is also, unbelievably, Truth. What, you disagree? What is truthful about projecting your ideals upon some unsuspecting other? Is it not another form of lying to yourself? But stop. Stop and think: what are we if not our hopes and dreams? Are we not the most honest with ourselves when we finally hunker down and admit what it is we truly want for ourselves, no matter how improbable or out of reach it may be? This is what I want. Whether I want it after I get it, let me decide when the time comes.  

Eleven A.M.      1926      Edward Hopper,    Oil on canvas


“At length the truth will out.”  

Two school terms, a summer, and another school term pass. They get along swimmingly. A few days ago she told The Golden Boy she loved him. Or rather, he coaxed it out of her; not to be unkind, but to feed the human need to be loved more than we are worth. I was not there, I do not know what they were discussing, only that the discussion led to this:



“Courage,” he asked, “Are you falling in love with me?” 


In her weakest and most beautiful moment she answered him, “I am, I am.”


“Ah.” he said, “I was afraid of that.” 

The Golden Boy did not feel the same way. He liked her as a friend. He loved the Golden Girl, and he hoped that he and Courage could remain friends. 


She nodded, feeling neither surprised nor hurt, only the strange feeling of the world dropping out from beneath her feet. 


We spoke on the phone a few days later, our voices hushed almost as though we were discussing a death in the family. 

“I knew as soon as I said it,” her voice was strong, though tinged with resignation, “I could feel it drain from me, all the power I had when I loved him but never expressed it. I showed him all my cards, and now I have nothing.” 



I disagree, Courage. You will always have the words, because you have always known them. 

My mother came into my room shortly after and asked me what I was thinking. 

I was debating, marveling, admiring. Here was a woman who feared spiders and germs and dark alleys, but who, when asked a question that would have sent anyone else bumbling and stuttering and lying down a million different paths, spoke the truth in much the same vein as my high school crush (so thank you, High School Crush, for at least being direct). The Golden Boy did not react as Courage had hoped; in fact she had known his answer long before he said it. But to hear it was akin to having it carved upon her heart. But she never stopped hoping – and while to some this may seem pitiful or obtuse or masochistic, it is this openness that will allow another to wander in and find himself at home.

But at the time I could not put it into words until my mother surprised me with her reaction, her eyes tearing up and her voice cracking. 

“How brave!” she said, “How brave of Courage to admit something like that. And how wonderful of her to share it with you so that you might learn something too.” 


“It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one’s life for love.”
— Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” Unknown Author 


“When old age shall this generation waste,
Though shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 
                                                              -Keats

Ode on a Friend Named Courage, 1

BettyLeave a comment
I have a friend I’ll call Courage. To those who know her, this name might seem funny or ill-fitting because Courage is actually afraid of many things, not all of which are readily visible or even understandable. She squirms at the thought of invisible germs and screams at tiny spiders. Once, on the verge of tears, she called her boyfriend to drive an hour to kill a spider crouching in the corner of her bathroom.
If I or any other of our friends were to walk down a dark alley by Courage’s side, others would point and say that Courage was a coward. In such places she walks with her shoulders high like a fortress around her ears, cold hands in a tense death grip around your arm. Regardless of whether you are a man or woman, she will make you feel obligated to protect her. Her grip tightens with every step you take, cutting off your blood supply so soon your fingers are turning cold too. Protect me, her hands say. Protect me from bums, from dark places, from vicious animals and from smelly trash bins. And if you are me, you roll your eyes and say, “Okay Courage, don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
And yet I call her Courage. I call her so because she is one of the bravest women I know. We cannot all fear the same things; at what Courage fears I would not bat an eye (though this depends, surely, on the size of the spider or vicious animal), yet of what she is not afraid terrifies me and nearly every person I know.
            Disclosure, let’s call it. 

            A year and a half ago, Courage went off to law school, which to some is a very brave move – law school can be a scary place where the books are thicker than the skins of those who read them – and while I would argue that Courage actually did not – no, does not – belong in Law School (and depending on the weather, she will nod in fervent agreement), it is sometimes braver to see a bad decision through than to back out, drop out, and look back years later only to say, “Oh what if.” (I know nothing about this sort of regret).
Being first and foremost a writer, Courage found respite from the toils of law school in a small and intimate writing group. Composed of a handful of like-minded writer friends who had also bravely embarked upon law school without really knowing why, the group gathered every Monday at someone’s small, messy house and shared the creative writing they did in between legal writing: essays and short stories, some long, some short; some true, some not. They read them aloud and voiced their thoughts, sometimes too gingerly to be constructive. In this way, Courage grew close to the The Golden Boy, whom she had met in class and who was both an archetype and a very real person. He was tall, blonde, athletic, needlessly handsome and to top it off, impossibly smart. He had once been a swimmer on the cusp of Olympic stardom and had the body to show for it, though not the medals; a fraction of a fraction of a second, he said.
In his own way, the Golden Boy was equally brave, at least at the outset. He admired her writing, and said so. This, I know, is a difficult thing for a writer to say to another writer. Apart from writing, writers (especially ones who have not been published), spend much of their time turning their noses down at other writers. Some will say it is more cutthroat than the legal profession because writers can mask their aggression behind pages and pages of florid prose. But Courage had never shied from singing the praises of my or any of our other friends’ work. Which raises another question, not wholly unrelated: had I done the same for her? Her style is different, the product of a steady childhood diet of Anne of Green Gables and other romantic, slowly unfolding coming of age stories – bildungsroman for young girls.

Interior, 1925 Edward Hopper, Watercolor

 As she grew into a young lady she fell headlong into the folds of Jane Austen’s dresses, into Hemingway’s Parisian feasts and seas, into Steinbeck’s Eden, Tolkien’s shires and into the very heart of C.S. Lewis’s God until one day, she emerged a woman. A woman with very particular literary tastes, though this is not to say she is narrow-minded. When Courage reads, she reads earnestly and adoringly, peppering the margins with her illegible chicken scratch. No matter whom she reads, if the writing speaks to her, she will read wholeheartedly. And it is because she was open in this way that the Golden Boy was able to wander in and find himself at home. 

They got along swimmingly. Slowly, the Golden Boy began to shape her days. They saw each other in class, and then studied together afterward. They were, of their writing group, the most serious about the “craft,” and were on occasion, the only two to show up, the others claiming academic exhaustion. Oh well. Between them, suppressed delight ensued. Courage and the Golden Boy would share a bottle of wine, read their work aloud, shyly at first, then talk late into the night.
Slowly, in the universal way that writers do when they fall in love, Courage began to write about him, for him, to him. And we women cannot help but hear the words as well – we learn to speak before we learn to write. To speak something is almost to believe something. One could not engage Courage in a conversation without the Golden Boy creeping his way in, and it was very clear to all her friends and perhaps even to her immigrant parents that their daughter had fallen in love. Who was this young man? What could explain his hold over her? Words love, words.
They exchanged emails, banter, texts, chats, blogs, and long, long essays about their pasts and their hopes for the future. Like a fish who had found a familiar undercurrent in a vast ocean, Courage felt that paradoxical warmth and cool refreshment one feels when they believe they have found “the one.” Emphasis on “believe.” 
You see, as an archetype, the Golden Boy and all the other male archetypes that follow (The Young Professor, the Old Professor, the Focused Genius) must always be in a relationship. He is invariably married or about to propose to a wonderful, equally brilliant and beautiful girlfriend who, even if she does not share the same interests, gives the impression that she is perfect for him. And the Golden Boy had such a woman in his life. She was more than just A Golden Girl, she was The Golden Girl: a lithe, blond-haired blue-eyed beauty with beautiful teeth to match her beautiful soul. She was, of all things, a wedding photographer – a complete artiste to the Golden Boy’s divided self. Was he a writer or a lawyer? It didn’t matter. He was the man. He would provide. The lawyer would do that while the writer would love and appreciate his woman’s art. After marriage he would prosecute or defend, depending on what his conscience could reconcile with his financial needs. But at night or perhaps in the early mornings, he would write. She would continue to photograph things people struggled to put into words: the adoring gazes of couples engaged, married, and later, the blank, doe-eyed stares of their round-faced children. Someday, the Golden Boy told Courage, he would meet his wife in the middle and become a full-fledged author.