Blue Plate Special (27 page)

After the van was towed away, we spent a few hours in the nearby hospital. With Henry’s hand in a cast, we walked along the highway from the hospital to a convenience store and a liquor store, then holed up for the night in a nearby motel, eating Doritos and smoking and drinking cheap vodka with orange juice and watching made-for-TV movies. We stayed up all night; we felt too guilty about missing our shift to sleep. We called Keith at six in the morning, after we knew the rush was over and the place was empty and he was sitting around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and told him (our voices slurred, on the verge of alcohol-inspired tears) that we loved him. He told us to shut the fuck up and get our asses back to town, now.

We got the first bus back to Portland and went straight to Roxy Hearts, contrite and pale. We told Keith to go home, we’d finish his shift. Henry’s hand was broken, of course, so I did most of the cooking and let him do the setups and garnishes. We worked the rest of that day and all night. After we hosed down the grease-covered rubber mats, bagged and took out the trash, prepped for Keith’s shift, scrubbed the counter-tops and degreased the grills, we said a bleary hello to Keith
and went out into the drizzling gray early morning and walked to Pioneer Courthouse Square and got a bus back to Southeast Portland.

We were feeling too sad, brokenhearted, and codependent to sleep by ourselves in our own apartments, so we both went to Henry’s, where he loaned me a pair of pajamas and a clean toothbrush. After we took showers, Henry pulled down his Murphy bed and made up a comfy foam pad for me on the floor. We slept all day, a whole eight-hour stretch, then woke up feeling groggy and seasick and took the bus back to Roxy Hearts to eat a big breakfast and drink as much coffee as we could before our shift.

T
hat spring, my mother and Ben began inquiring, whenever we talked on the phone, about my plans for the coming year, by which they meant school year, by which they meant graduate school. I told them I didn’t really know; maybe I’d move to San Francisco and get a job as a cocktail waitress. That was what I was doing now in Portland, serving drinks in a blues bar called the Last Hurrah, making more money than I’d ever made before. This seemed like a viable option to me, but they both, on different extensions, made it clear that they felt strongly that I should at least apply somewhere for something.

So I took the GREs and used two stories from my Reed senior thesis, since I hadn’t written anything since then, to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Then I forgot all about it and started thinking about moving to San Francisco. When I got the acceptance letter from Iowa, I was already despairing about how hard it would be to start over, alone, not really knowing the city at all, since we’d left the Bay Area before I turned eight. I carried the letter across the Reed campus, rereading it, stunned and ablaze. Then I got another letter informing me that I had been awarded a research assistantship,
which paid four hundred dollars a month, enough to live on. I was also thereby qualified to pay in-state tuition, most of which I could take out loans to cover. My mother and Ben offered to help with tuition as well.

At the end of that summer, in late August 1987, Kip (who had just graduated, and who no doubt saw me as the perfect means to postpone having to figure out what to do with his own life) and I bought a VW hatchback and put all our things in it and moved to Iowa City together.

Iowa City was a flat little town filled with sorority girls with bleached perms and fake tans; burly frat boys in Hawkeye football jerseys; and a substratum of dark, gothy kids with tattoos, dyed-black hair, and motorcycle boots. Wide, straight, tree-lined streets paralleled the Iowa River and were bisected by others in neat lines. All the restaurants in town were terrible. There was one I liked called the Hamburg Inn, a classic American greasy spoon that served good eggs and hash browns for breakfast and good hamburgers and fries for dinner, but that was about it.

The Writers’ Workshop itself was terrifying, chilly, and competitive. It was housed on the third floor of a gigantic Soviet-bloc-era–like building called EPB, the English-Philosophy Building, that overlooked the river, a gloomy gray bulwark with oblong-porthole windows. The hallways were bleak and cold, the classrooms modern and drab. Being in a roomful of other ambitious, dedicated writers felt like being in a zoo, stared at by all the other zoo animals. I’d always hated being watched, preferred being the observer, but now I felt the eyes of people just like me on me, observing the same sorts of things I was observing about them. It was disconcerting and unpleasant. Walking into a workshop felt like stepping into a minefield. I had heart palpitations, stage fright. Workshop parties were no better. I was even afraid to go to readings.

Kip and I rented the ground-floor apartment of an old house on Davenport Street near campus for $425 a month. The only bathroom was downstairs at the very end of the basement, and there was no bedroom. Kip built us a bed, which we installed next to the built-in dining room hutch. We ate in the kitchen, and I wrote in the living room. I went to my weekly workshop with Frank Conroy, whose first year as program director this was, and to my contemporary short-story class, while Kip looked for a carpentry job, scouring want ads and bulletin boards. At night, we sat at our kitchen table and furrowed our brows at each other, both of us wondering what we were doing here.

Then I made two friends—first Sally, a brilliant, hilarious, wild-blond-haired Czech girl from Missouri who had lived in New York for years and was worldly and sophisticated and wore a lot of black lacy things, but who also was a Christian fundamentalist who believed fervently in God and lived in a cabin outside town and decorated her one big room with bare branches. Her writing was wildly gorgeous, exalted and original. Then Gretchen befriended me one day after workshop in the hallway by giving me a sideways high five. She was a wry, sultry, kind, tough-minded poet from Oklahoma who’d gone to a women’s college and wore hot-pink glasses and wrote clear-sighted, discursive, passionate poetry. Gretchen and Sally were my sources of love and support at that scary place. Sally and I sat in the student union café all afternoon over salads and iced tea, having pensive, exalted, speculative conversations about love and writing. We took walks along the Iowa River and described our childhoods to each other. Gretchen called me up late at night after I was asleep, and announced that I’d better get dressed because she was picking me up in ten minutes and we were going to a truck stop on the highway to eat breakfast and play jukebox country songs and flirt with truckers. She and I went to country auctions and bid on dish towels
and knickknacks; I developed a crush on the walleyed auctioneer. All three of us talked about men, constantly: we couldn’t figure them out. But it seemed urgent that we do so as soon as possible.

Kip, meanwhile, arranged to audit a physics class and got a minimum-wage job working for a taciturn carpenter who seemed to hate him. He left the house before dawn every morning and came home exhausted and despondent. For dinners, we generally made variations on
Moosewood Cookbook
hippie food, three-bean chili or pasta with vegetable tomato sauce or chickpea mush; we were equally ascetic and low maintenance about food. We invited friends over sometimes or went to their houses. Kip’s and my dinner parties often devolved, alas, into sing-alongs, when Kip got out his guitar and folk songbook, but everyone was very nice about it and chimed in on “A fox went out on a chilly night” without protest.

One late fall night, at another dinner party, a fellow fiction writer named Ann Packer served a rice dish of spicy sausages and shrimp and chicken all together. She called it jambalaya. It was amazing, and I had never heard of it before. Cajun food hadn’t caught on yet. She’d cut the recipe out of a food magazine, she told me, and it was easy to make and she’d be happy to share it. In that midwestern college town of pizza and bad Mexican food and cheeseburgers, that meal was a bright spot of sustenance, a spark of inspiration I saved in the back of my mind for later on, someday, when I once again returned to food.

Kip lasted with me until winter, and then he got fed up with his crappy job, the horrible weather, and the podunk university town. He moved back to Palo Alto and instantly got a great job renovating someone’s house. I was sad and lonely without him. I pined for him, called him all the time, wrote him letters. When summer came, I went out to the Bay Area to live with him. His father hired us to install an oak floor in
his kitchen; we house-sat and took care of pets for a number of people Kip knew in Palo Alto and La Honda. I was churlish and anxious all summer. I knew perfectly well that Kip wasn’t in love with me, wasn’t even particularly attracted to me, but I could not accept this as the final verdict. I kept thinking that if I did something differently, better, if I broke through his sweetly opaque, maddeningly unavailable facade …

I saw my father again that summer. I called him to let him know I was there. He instantly said that we should get together. One evening, he drove from San Francisco out to Half Moon Bay, where Kip’s family lived, and picked me up and took me to dinner at a seafood restaurant nearby on the water. I ordered something cheap and had just one glass of wine, since I wasn’t sure how much money my father had. As always, he was impersonally affable, mildly interested in my life, distant, and hard to connect with. I was shy and itchy with him. I had no idea what to say to him, and by now it had begun to dawn on me that it wasn’t all up to me to try to break through to this man. Naturally, I didn’t make any sort of leap of association to my current romantic relationship, which was limping along, leaning heavily on my one-sided, blind adoration.

“I saw your half sister Thea a little while ago,” my father told me. “She came to the Bay Area and looked me up, just like you did. About a month ago.”

“Thea!” I said. I had always wanted to know my half sisters. “What does she look like?”

“She looks like us,” he said. “Like a Johansen.”

At the end of the meal, my father was abruptly rude to the waitress. I was, daughterlike, mortified at his brusqueness. It was the most real, honest, nonfraught thing I’d felt with him since I was a little girl. I felt a quick intimation of what it might have been like if he’d been willing and able to be a real father to me, the complicated, interesting, bone-deep luxury of being
embarrassed by him. I might have told him he’d been rude. He might have teased me for being critical. I might have laughed and told him to be nicer. And so forth.

Instead, my father dropped me off back at Kip’s. We hugged good-bye stiffly, and then he drove off, and I never saw him again.

A
week or so later, as Kip and I were finishing up the floor at his father’s house, I got a phone call from an editor in New York City. “I’m calling from
Mademoiselle
magazine,” she said. “We’ve been trying to track you down for weeks! Finally!”

“You have?” I asked blankly.

I had won their fiction contest, which meant a prize of one thousand dollars and the publication of my story, “Bowling with the Barracudas,” in their magazine. A writer named Michael Chabon had won it the year before; I’d liked his story, so on a whim I’d entered the contest with an autobiographical story I’d written about a cocktail waitress in Portland who witnesses the stabbing of a young gay man in the street. I’d forgotten all about it. Frank Conroy hadn’t thought much of my story—had disliked it very much, in fact—so I didn’t expect anything to come of it.

This windfall came at just the right time. I was anxiously broke, trying to figure out how to get back to Iowa at the end of the summer, and how to pay September rent on my new apartment. And now I’d be published; the thrill of that took a while to sink in and disappeared as soon as it happened, when I realized that publishing my work opened me to an entire new world of scary exposure.

My story, now renamed “Temptations” and severely edited by three imperious New York women, ran that fall, when I was back at the workshop. Shortly afterward, I was having a drink with my friends Gretchen and Ned at the Fox Head, the workshop
hangout. Ned’s girlfriend, Mary, a severely plain, relentlessly self-important poetess, turned to me.

“I saw your story in the magazine,” she said. She had never paid attention to me before.

“Oh,” I said, immediately nervous and flattered and hopeful.

“Yeah,” she said, “I tried to read it.”

Then she ignored me again.

During the first semester of my second year at Iowa, I took a workshop class with Allan Gurganus, who immediately became my favorite teacher there. He was dapper and ebullient and always wore a different tie to each workshop. He was also a warm, inspired teacher, opinionated, brilliant, funny; he loved real writing, hated pretentiousness. He encouraged visceral emotion, humor, real old-fashioned storytelling, rolled his eyes at cerebral formal coldness, egotistical displays of technique. He didn’t care what the literary trends and fashions were. He cared about what was good.