Writing Is My Drink (15 page)

somewhere, just get on with the next writing project. Obvi-

ously, this would be the ideal. Obviously, I’m nowhere close

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to being that person. I’m prone to obsessing, and writing has

provided much fodder for obsessing. Saves me from chewing

on my own arm, I guess.

A week or so after I finished Terry Tempest Williams’s fac-

ulty development seminar, I drove to the post office and dropped

down the chute the manila envelopes stuffed with my two fiction

writing program applications. Doubling the scope of my admis-

sion pool since my first attempt at this ten years earlier, I applied to San Diego State University and the University of Washington

in Seattle, choosing two places Kevin and I had family nearby.

Most of us don’t want to wait for anything, no matter how

benign—dinner, our turn in line at the bank—but waiting takes

on a new dimension when one is hoping to be chosen for some-

thing one truly and completely wants. With one vulnerable arm

stretched in the air, we wait as our second-grade teacher selects

the lucky one who’ll help pass out the cupcakes, knowing it’s

impossible to hide our hungry need to be chosen.

To be chosen
. Chosen.
We all want to be picked for the scholarship, or for the coveted job, or by the beautiful person to love

us. But for some of us the need to be chosen is more acute. Child-

hood neglect, the unfulfilled need to be the star of our parents’

lives, can render us particularly vulnerable to the high-voltage

joy the shortlist can spark. When we’re final y picked, we’re cart-

wheeling with excitement. Conversely, not being singled out for

love, prizes, or the role of Maria, Dorothy, or Juliet can usher in a flood of anguish, our suspicion confirmed once again that we

lack that
je ne sais quoi
of the chosen.

My stepfather, Bil , who entered my life when I was ten, as-

suaged some of my childhood need to be chosen. He had no

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obligation to play the part of my dad, but once he signed up for

it, he embraced that role and never treated me as if I were any

less than ful y his own. I’m unfamiliar with the experience of the

biological father who stays by you, though I assume it’s fabu-

lous in an expected way like breathing oxygen and that those

accustomed to paternal stability sleep eight uninterrupted hours

a night and whiz through standardized tests. I do know, how-

ever, the particular and exquisite happiness of someone
choosing
to parent you, of having someone show up for you when they

could’ve easily chosen not to. Even without biology and soci-

ety’s mandate, Bill cared for me when I had the flu, attended

my back-to-school nights, and figured out how to get me home

from Montreal during an airline strike.

I’d called Bill “Dad” since a few days after he and my mother

got married in 1971. Some may think I rushed in on the rebound,

but I knew right away he was the real deal. And even though for

years I always felt like I had to say no to the question “But is he your
real
dad?” for me the true answer always felt like yes. He was the dad who taught me to ski, who watched
The Twilight Zone

with me on rainy Saturday afternoons, who stood up for me and

believed in me. My biological father was the one who seemed any-

thing but real. He was the check in the mail, the card at Christmas, the awkward hug, the Dad of Ninth Step amends that came too

late to take root, JoJo’s son now long passed away from cancer.

Even after he and my mother divorced, my dad and I man-

aged to hang on to each other. It was just one more adjustment

for a family slightly off course from the ideal, but I’d been mak-

ing these adjustments my whole life, ever since my parents broke

up when I was one year old.

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Right around the time Natalie was born, Bill started to get

sick. His smoking-related coughing worsened, and eventual y he

was diagnosed with emphysema. When he played Duck, Duck,

Goose with Natalie, he’d get winded after a few minutes and

would tell her with discernible shame that she’d “won.” During

a Christmas visit, he was hospitalized for pneumonia. In Febru-

ary, he and his new wife (wife number four, but when we love

people, we try not to do too much counting) came for a month-

long stay, and by then his emphysema had severely limited his

ability to move around. We had to call the paramedics more

than once when he went into respiratory failure. But I couldn’t

recognize his decline; I refused to accept it. I was not prepared

to lose him, the person I figured might fend off lions and tigers

and bears if such animals were to come after me.

On the last day of March of 1997, the director of the University

of Washington’s English Creative Writing Program called to tell

me I was the first person on the waiting list for the next year’s

fiction group. And this is good news
because
. . . ? They had eight slots, which had all been offered to their top choices (uh-
hunh
); but if any of those candidates were to decide not to come, there

could be a spot open. “If it were offered,” he asked, “would you

take it?”

Yes . . . yes, I would. Not only was the school my first choice,

but I’d be close enough to go back and forth between Seattle and

my dad’s place on Vancouver Island. I had to get in.

The waiting began.

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• • •

rector final y called me back. I was in! The suspense was over.

Something in that thin ten-page writing sample had secured me

a spot after al . I’ve had a few truly sweet writing victories since then, but this was the first time I felt my promise as a writer confirmed, and I was sil y with joy, thrilled that in just a few months I’d be nestled into the program and writing.

I couldn’t wait to tell my dad. I knew he’d be so happy for me.

“I have news!” I said into phone, looking out at the red and

white canyons across the lava field, the colors suddenly Tech-

nicolor bright.

“I do too, I’m afraid,” he said.

My heart dropped. “Okay, you first,” I said, starting to feel

dizzy.

“The doctor says I have lung cancer.”

The world went black. I know we fumbled through a con-

versation about the X-rays, what the doctor had said, what it

all meant. But all I remember is clenching the phone like a life

preserver, thinking, I’m losing him. My protector.

We were about to hang up when he said, “Wait. What’s your

news?”

“Oh, I got in,” I whispered.

“What?”

“The MFA program in Seattle. I got in.” It seemed so trivial

now.

“That’s terrific!” he said, happy for me, although I no longer

cared.

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I barely remember saying good-bye and hanging up. What

I remember is sitting down on the floor, staring at the weave of

the rug, trying to figure out how things come together and fall

apart so quickly, trying to remember how to stand and how to

speak.

On June 11 we moved to Seattle, and on July 17 my dad died.

In the five weeks in between my body was on the freeway or on

the ferry and my spirit was circling the territory in between Se-

attle and his Vancouver Island town like a hawk that’s forgotten

where home is. Natalie was two, and she came along with me

most of the time. For the last few weeks of his life, Bill stayed

at the hospital on the palliative care floor. I found out what the

word “palliative” means and wished I hadn’t. Whenever I’d go

to visit him, he’d be in the middle of a book: one time,
Angela’s
Ashes
, the next a history of London. “I don’t know why,” he said, holding up the thick book, “but I’m still so curious about everything.”

His room was always crowded with visitors—my brother’s

family, my dad’s wife, Natalie and me. Once he cleared everyone

out of the room and asked me to stay.

“You have made me very happy,” he said. I’m ashamed to say

that I wanted more. What could be more than making someone

happy? For some insane reason I wanted him to say that he was

proud of me, but he didn’t. Of course, to him nothing was better

than happiness and I didn’t ask for anything more. I took the gift

of “happy” and held it as tightly as I could, hoping that might

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reverse the effects of decades of smoking but it didn’t. The next

week he was gone.

I felt guilty that I hadn’t done something spectacular with

my life before he died. I wanted to prove to him that everything

he’d invested in me had been worthwhile, that I hadn’t taken

anything for granted. Perhaps one of the differences between

being raised by your “real” father and a stepfather is that no mat-

ter how exquisite the love and the care, I still felt like I needed to repay, to prove. Or maybe that’s just exactly what it feels like when your dad dies too soon.

The rest of that summer passed slowly. I waited for grief to

end and for new beginnings. I longed for the fall to come, for

Natalie’s preschool to start up, and for my first quarter in the

MFA program to begin. Slowly the days of a hot August slipped

by and September arrived with its new beginning: My dream of

attending writing school began, just a few days after I found out

I was expecting baby number two.

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Try This

1. Make a list of times when you had to wait for something you

real y wanted or to find out bad or good news. Write about

one of them.

2. Now write about another.

3. Write about what those two times had in common and how

they differed.

4. 4. Write about a time when you got what you wanted. Was

it all that you wished for, or was getting what you’d desired a

mixed blessing?

5. Write about a time when you didn’t. Was it all bad? Was there

some advantage you can see now to not getting what you’d

wanted? Could you see the silver lining even then?

6. Write about this topic: “Being Chosen.” When have you been

one of the “chosen”? What did it feel like to be chosen? What

is the dark side of being chosen?

7. Write about a person you chose or a person who chose you.

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8

Find your tribe;

Find your Voice

Even if you don’t know a single writer in real life, you can build

your own writing community by staking your claim on the writ-

ers who speak to you and inspire you, the writers who excite you

about the possibility of writing. I think that, very early on, each of us knows the type of voice and stories we are drawn to. I’ve

always found myself yearning for a representation of my own

experience on the page. As a writer I long to break the isolation

of the unarticulated experience, the trap of the ineffable. And as

a reader, I am hungry for the literary representations of the self.

It’s not so much that I’m eager to know the details of others’ lives or that I believe my own experience is so compelling that they

should want to know mine; it’s that I adore the wizardry of the

alchemical process in which life is spun into story.

In the sixth grade, I had my first flicker of knowledge of who

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my tribe of writers was, the first flush of my crush on first-per-

son narrative Two books I read that year that woke in me the

desire to tell stories were Judy Blume’s
Are You There God? It’s
Me, Margaret
and Xaviera Hol ander’s
The Happy Hooker
. The Blume book I found in a bookmobile on a snowy afternoon. I

cracked it open right there, and as I dripped melted snow on

the linoleum floor, I heard this first-person girl voice that had

traveled through the hands of some New York publisher and

then into my local library and then up the snowy hill into the

bookmobile to save me. I’d just moved to Canada from Califor-

nia the year before, right after my mom and Bill were married.

I needed a bit of saving. The narrator of
Are You There God?

It’s Me, Margaret
was a girl like me, a girl who struggled with friends and who needed to get her first bra. Blume made ordinary sixth-grade life pop open with a
pow.
In the book’s pages I heard the voice of someone like me, a friend, not the artificial y