Here are the winners of Story Circle's Life-Writing Competition, chosen for their freshness and originality, and the clarity and authenticity of the author's voice:
Topic: This year's topic focuses on Truth. Here are some women's wise words to help you start thinking:
"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
~Gloria Steinem~"The best mind-altering drug is truth."
~Lily Tomlin~"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
~Virginia Woolfe~
We know you will enjoy these stories as much as we do. Congratulations to our four winners! And look for an announcement of our next competition in June, 2007.
In my anesthesia haze, I imagine the light boring through my eyelids is pinning me to the operating table like one of those hairless pigs I dissected in Honors Biology way back when. I can't squirm out from under the hard thing pressing against my right breast. It pulls my skin taut and then slices through. God help me.
"I'm going to give you a little more anesthesia," I hear Dr. Warner say.
It's cold in this room. My left leg is shaking of its own accord, a pale quivering lip. I want to reach down and hold it still. I can smell Dr. Warner's hands moving near my face. They smell of antiseptic and latex. The clang of sharp instruments on a metal tray reverberates between my ears.
"The tumor is deeper than I thought." It's Dr. Warner again. I can barely hear him now.
"Is that bad?" I want to ask, but my mouth won't form the words. Someone's cut the wiring between my brain and my face. I feel the hard thing scooping out more of my flesh. I remember yanking at the roots of the wandering jew choking out the lilies in my garden last summer. Then the memory softens around its edges and slides away from me.
I wake up half a day later in a plastic lounge chair the color of cooked oatmeal. A muddy pink basin like a kidney bean sits in my lap. What looks like half a clothespin is clipped to my right index finger. I'm finally wrapped in a warming blanket but I'm still shaking.
My husband Eric sits next to me flipping through the pages of Sports Illustrated and drumming his fingers on the edge of his chair. I try to shift my body in his direction. It seems to take about half an hour. "What did he say?" I ask, my tongue not quite fitting between my teeth.
Eric looks up at me. I notice how blue his eyes are. They're as blue as the sky the day we met. "Who?" he asks. There are fine lines around his eyes now. They weren't there before. Neither was the impatience in his tone.
"Dr. Warner," I say. Anxiety is worming its way into the space behind my chest. How did this happen?
"He didn't say anything. He hasn't been by yet...hey, how much longer do you think we'll be here?" Eric checks his watch.
My mouth is dry and tastes like I've been sucking on rusty nails. I want some ice-chips. "Eric...do you think—"
Dr. Warner strides around the paisley curtain separating me from the next woman over. She's retching whatever's left inside her.
Dr. Warner takes my wrist between his thumb and forefinger. "Your heart was beating a little fast as you were coming out of anesthesia." He pauses. "It seems okay now." Dr. Warner drops my hand and looks down at a paper on his clipboard. "You're probably feeling it was a doozy," he says.
"A doozy?" What an odd way to characterize losing part of my breast.
Eric laughs. "He said you're probably still woozy."
Oh. "Yeah...I guess I am." I've been woozy since two weeks ago when I found the lump in the shower and a note from "S" in my husband's pants pocket on the same day.
"I brought the tumor to pathology myself," Dr. Warner says.
I'm not sure whether this belongs on the good or bad news side of the ledger and I'm too tired to ask. But I can tell by the way he says it that it's unusual. I have a ridiculous flash of him trotting down the hallway with a red ball pulsing and smoking on a silver tray.
"The pathologist didn't feel the need to do a frozen section. It doesn't look malignant." Dr. Warner puts his pen back in the pocket of his white lab coat. "You're going to die someday young lady, but I'm certain it won't be from breast cancer." He smiles broadly. He's finished here.
I close my eyes. I just want to know. Please just tell me something for sure. The uncertainty is almost unbearable. "When will you have the path report?" I ask.
"Probably within the week," says Dr. Warner over his shoulder.
Four days later, I'm waiting on line at the grocery store, fishing in my bag for my keys when my cell phone rings.
I fumble it open and expect to hear my mother telling me she'll be late coming by to pick my daughter up for their annual birthday shopping spree.
"There's no easy way to tell you this," Dr. Warner says. He sounds grave and apologetic.
I focus on the woman bagging my groceries. A short red thread is tangled in a buttonhole of her yellow sweater. Then I double over my shopping cart.
Dr. Warner tells me that he was wrong. I do have breast cancer. The lump I found in the shower turned out to be a stage 1 small (thank God), grade 3 nasty (oh my God) malignant tumor.
"The inflammation around the tumor fooled me," Dr. Warner says. "Most cancers are hard to the touch and don't move around. Yours was spongy and mobile." He pauses. "I have to admit, though...it did look angry."
"Angry?" What am I to make of an angry tumor? Is my body pissed off at me? I sure as hell am pissed off at it. Or maybe it's given up on me expressing any dark emotion and has done it for me? Have I been sucking it up and acting the good girl for so long that my repressed anger morphed into a ball of mutant killer cells?
I'm sitting on the littered pavement beside my car, balancing the cell phone on my shoulder and pounding my head into my open palm. My groceries are wilting in the sun.
Dr. Warner is still talking, "There's little scientific evidence to back me up on this, but I believe this type of cancer in women as young as you is caused by stress."
Excuse me? I can't hold it in this time. "Stress caused my angry tumor? Why the hell didn't someone warn me not to get stressed or I'd end up with breast cancer? Isn't this something women should know? I mean...isn't this freakin' billboard material? Doesn't everyone have stress? I have two small kids, a full time job and a husband who I'm pretty sure is cheating on me. How can I not have stress? And one more thing...are you implying I did this to myself?" I stop because there's no air left in my lungs.
Dr. Warner can't wait to get off the phone now. He begins speaking in a soft, coddling tone...as if he's dealing with a psychotic mental patient. "You'll have to get yourself a breast surgeon and an oncologist. Call me if you need help finding one."
Out of habit, I dial Eric's number. I need him to tell me things will be okay. I get his voice mail. "Hi. It's Eric. Leave me..."
I put the phone down and hang my head between my knees.
About the author:
Pixie Paradiso is a very grateful and blessed breast cancer survivor. She lives just west of Boston and is an in-house attorney for a pediatric hospital. She has two wonderful daughters who challenge her to be the best she can be and who make every day a delight. Pixie is passionate about journaling and memoir writing. She fires up the computer just about every night after the girls go to bed. Maybe when they're eighteen she'll finally get some sleep.
My sister has been through two husbands, both tall and fair. There were children, one from each husband. They cheated on her, and she cheated on them. There was drinking. There were drugs. They slapped Charmaine around, and she was real sorry, and they always took her back. Or, she took them back. It depended on the whim of the week. They did this until it played out.
"Remember that time your dad came for a visit?" Charm said to me one day. She was in the hospital recovering from her latest beating. "I was around four."
I remembered, and felt guilty all over again. He'd come for my graduation from high school. His occasional presence always sent my brother and me into father-adoration hysteria. Some of it must have rubbed off on my little sister. Charm was the sweetest kid, shy and quiet, never a problem. She hung around my father's knees, staring at him adoringly, and asked, "Can I call you daddy?"
"No," came his stern reply. Charm looked hurt, but she didn't cry. She never asked again, nor did she mention the incident, but the unraveling of my mother's past had been set in motion.
Her birth seven years after my parents' divorce had always needed some explaining. Back then, Mom had filled in the details in her own enigmatic way. "Your daddy thought you were beautiful," she'd say to Charm with a sigh. "But, he was a musician, and it just wasn't meant to be."
My brother and I accepted this version of the affair that produced my sister with few questions, even though Charm looks completely different from the rest of us. We're all tall blonds. Charm is petite and cinnamon-coffee dark with tightly curled blue-black hair.
"Your father was Sicilian," Mom said. We anxiously believed that somewhere below the boot of Italy, there was a whole flock of people who looked just like our sister.
"I want to find my real father," she said now, thirty-five years later.
We had the name of the man Mom claimed to be Charm's father. With the internet the rest was easy. So Charm called this guy, Sam Gianni in Michigan, and said she was his grown-up daughter in Santa Fe just calling to say Hi! Yes, he told her, he was a musician who had traveled there to play for the opera, but no, he was not aware of the birth of a daughter and what's more, he didn't remember our mother.
All hell broke loose at that point.
Sam's loss of memory regarding their affair hit Mom's vanity dead center. Her bedroom eyes snapped open, but turned hard and small in the depths. "Just like a man," she said. Her slippered feet pounded off in the direction of her room, but her shoulders slumped like the little old lady she is. She refused to discuss the matter further.
A few weeks later, we went out for drinks—my little sister, Mom, and I. While sitting at the bar together, Charm started begging for the truth. Again. "Who's my real father?" she said. "Why won't you tell me?"
"I've got a confession to make," Mom said in her smokiest storytelling voice. "Around 1963, when I was bartending at the El Corral...something happened." She took a slow puff of her cigarette, drawing in deeply since it's a low tar brand, her only concession to the Surgeon General's report.
"Business was slow," she continued on the exhale. The nimbus of smoke surrounding the three of us excluded everyone else at the bar; we were in our mother's world now. "I locked up early to get a head start on inventory. I was in the backroom when I heard a noise behind me." She paused here, and looked Charm right in the eye.
"A man was standing there. A black man. He said not to be afraid, that he wouldn't hurt me if I didn't scream. He emptied the cash register...and then he raped me." Charm and I gasped.
Mom looked pleased. "I had been with Sam earlier that day. So, you see, I really don't know who your real father is." Charm stared at Mom, her mouth slightly open.
It could have happened like this. Or maybe not. Mom's older sister, who was seventy-eight last year, and the family informer, told on her. "Your mother was dating a black guy back then. I don't know why she can't admit it." My aunt tapped her fingers and stared off into space. "He played the saxophone at the jazz club."
Sam the Sicilian's instrument was the violin.
Mom doesn't understand why it's so important to Charm to know her father. "I was the one who took care of her," she told me. In my mother's world, the fathers and the truth are always expendable. "I know you all think I'm a bad mother," she added, a question beneath her armor.
"No, Mom, it's not that we think you're a bad mother," I said. "It's that we think you're a bad liar."
That day in the hospital with my sister, I remembered another incident from our shared past. In 1968, Charm was five, and I was home for a weekend from college. My brother and I, along with our little sister, had driven over to a shopping center to buy shoes. A demonstration for Black Power was in progress in the parking area. A lot of that went on in those days.
As I helped Charm down from the car, a tall, very thin, and very dignified, Afro-haired young black man stepped apart from the crowd and approached us. He was carrying a stack of leaflets with various slogans printed on it. Ignoring my brother and me, he stooped low and handed Charm one of the papers.
"Here you go, sister," he said to her.
My brother and I laughed, standing there in the hard sunlight. My memory is an unrelenting snapshot: our heads tilted back in the same way, our blond hair and strong teeth gleaming mercilessly bright above the rare blue-black luster of our sister's curly-topped head. We laughed back then, looking into each other's eyes, and never told Mom, nor kept the memory alive for Charm.
No father ever came to claim Charmaine.
No son of Sicily, memory restored and classically trained, arrived to lift my sister's spirit on lofty waves of Bach or Mozart. No ebony patriarch appeared to teach my sister about her roots, dark and deep, black pride reverberating on the complex notes of his sax.
"Black is beautiful, sister," he could have told her. "Take pride."
About the author:
Sandra Ramos O'Briant's work has appeared in Café Irreal and Best Lesbian Love Stories of 2004, and is included in Women Write the Southwest (University of Texas Press, Spring 2007), and Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press, 2007). Excerpts from her first novel, The Secret of Old Blood: The Sandoval Sisters, have appeared in La Herencia, FriGG, and The Copperfield Review. Her book reviews have been published on La Bloga and Moorishgirl. Please visit her at www.sramosobriant.com.
Kate worked quietly. She didn't want to disturb John. He had been sleeping all evening in preparation for his long drive to Boston. Now that the children were tucked in for the night, Kate felt it was safe to go about her business with no interruptions, no little eyes to see and no little mouths to tell.
She opened the trunk of the 1950 Rambler. There was plenty of space for the picnic basket she had packed full of his favorite snacks. It fit next to the duffel bag, the one John had used in the Air Force. The plan was for Kate and the children to take the train and join him in Boston after he found an apartment. She had packed the duffel bag full of clothing for herself and the children in order to lighten the baggage she would be taking on the train. After his summer training session, the family would travel back to California together by car. She opened the bag and added an extra pair of jeans for Jimmy and a sun suit for Lisa.
Staring at the dim light in the car trunk, Kate pictured John driving solo across country. He kept the ten-year-old sedan in good shape, and he was a good driver; she wasn't concerned about his safety. He'll make it OK. This will be good for us, I suppose, being away from one another for a little while. It hasn't been easy this last year. Even the kids seem to sense we're not the same somehow. She opened his suitcase. I hope we can recapture something—whatever it is we've lost—on our trip this summer.
Kate reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a small book—a lavishly illustrated love poem she had found when last browsing through the bookstore. On the flyleaf she had written, "For my husband, with hope for our future and with all the love I know how to give." She tucked it under his white shirts.
What in the world...? Under the shirts was a stack of envelopes held together with a rubber band. They had not been mailed; each one simply had his first name on it in cursive writing. She picked them up cautiously. That looks something like Jenny's handwriting...
Kate removed the rubber band and put it around her wrist. She took the letter from the first envelope with a sense of foreboding and, holding it near the trunk light, began to read. "My darling John, Can it be true that last night was our last meeting for three whole months? I think I won't be able to stand it until you return." In dazed disbelief, Kate didn't want to look at the signature, but she couldn't stand not to. She turned the page over. "Jenny!" she gasped. The sound echoed in her head and around the garage as if she had yelled it into a canyon, and she wondered if the whole neighborhood had heard her.
Suddenly fearful of being caught—as a child she was taught that nice people don't read other people's mail—she refolded the letter carefully and returned it to the envelope. One was enough. She counted the rest—twenty-three—resecured them with the rubber band and replaced them beneath the stack of white shirts. She, too, seemed to want them hidden. But the shirts could not cover up what she had read. Neither could the suitcase lid, nor the car trunk lid. Just before closing the trunk, Kate removed the book and the duffel bag, then stashed them in the kitchen pantry.
I should have recognized the signs. She thought of the other women who had attracted him—several girls in high school who were prettier than she, the sexy college coed who pursued him even though he was married, his sister's coquettish friend whose flirtation titillated him. But why Jenny? And why would Jenny do this to me? Talk about a double cross! Why...? She couldn't unravel whose betrayal cut more deeply, her husband's or her best friend's. The timer on the oven pronounced sentence; it was time to awaken John.
Kate put the lamb chops in the broiler, checked herself in the mirror and went into the bedroom. They had shared several bedrooms over their eleven-year marriage, but this one in the suburbs of Los Angeles they had shared for only one year. They were here so that John could attend the theological seminary. He was also serving as Christian Education Director at the local Community Church where Jenny was the choir director. Kate sang in the choir. She had admired Jenny's musical talents and looked upon her as a mentor of sorts in this new church and community to which Kate and John had come as strangers. Jenny, at forty-five, was fifteen years older than John, plumpish and—now that Kate thought about it—a bit frumpy. Jenny and Sam had four children. As families they spent a lot of time together, and the two women became close friends—or so Kate had believed.
Taking a deep fortifying breath, Kate sat down on her side of the bed and shook John gently. "Hey, mister, it's time to get up." This was her usual way of waking him. "Soup's on, and then it's time to hit the road." He groaned. She left the bedroom before he was completely awake, not wanting to confront him with the evidence she had discovered in his suitcase. Right now it seemed that his being far away—from her and from Jenny—was the best thing. No, she couldn't talk to him about it now. Not now. If they started spilling their feelings tonight, John would miss his entire three-month pastoral internship and then be late for September classes. And I need time to think.
Kate removed the wine glasses from the table. Drinking a toast tonight no longer fit the occasion. And she didn't want to dampen her defenses. John came into the kitchen in his unbelted bathrobe, blonde hair boyishly tousled, still drowsy, yawning and stretching and scratching his head. I wonder if Jenny has ever seen him like this.
During dinner Kate was grateful for the dim candlelight and that John was too bleary-eyed to see through her forced smile. It was his favorite dinner: lamb chops, mushrooms, asparagus, popovers and lemon meringue pie. These were ingredients they could ill afford, but she had rationalized that this was a special occasion. Instead, it was a discomfiting tête-à-tête, neither being eager to engage the other in dicey conversation.
At midnight they said their tepid goodbyes. "I'll see you and the kids in a couple of weeks," was John's last remark. Don't be too sure, she thought. His Rambler pulled out of the driveway. Kate stood there motionless long after he was out of sight, finally, grudgingly, acknowledging a sense of relief at seeing him go. Alone in the warm California summer night, she shivered. She had never felt so cold and empty and bereft in all her twenty-nine years.
She was coming next week, my parents said. She would stay in my room, they said. I must clear a drawer for her, they said. They had said enough. I didn't say a word. I just walked out the door giving it a little slam. All the way across the back yard and down into the pasture I walked, muttering to myself. Well, I might have to give her my room but I don't have to like it or her! She wasn't going to make me like her, no matter what!
She was my great Aunt Ann, my father's youngest aunt, coming to visit us from her home in Texas. I had never met her, even on our trips to Texas to visit Granny, because she lived in another part of Texas, many miles away. Daddy thought she was special. He told stories about her piano playing ability. She could play anything, he would tell us, because she could play music "by ear." So what, I grumbled. Who cares?
I was just ten years old. After years of sharing a room with my three sisters, I had just moved into a room of my own. Now, this "aunt" person was coming to take it all away from me. Mom said it was because my bedroom was the closest to the bathroom. I told her that was the reason she shouldn't be in my room. The smell and noise from flushing toilets was really awful. Mom didn't buy my logic. The worst part was that I now had to sleep in my youngest sister's twin bed with her, and I would never hear the end of it. This all just stunk and I didn't care who knew it, in a quiet sort of way, of course. Mom didn't mind if we didn't like something, but she didn't want to hear about it more than once. Then we were supposed to keep it to ourselves and work it out.
I was starting to feel a little guilty. Maybe I shouldn't be so selfish. I know I should be nice to her, but, darn it, I am always the one who has to be good, and nice to everyone, even when my other sisters were being brats! I suppose if I keep this up I'll have to go to confession, I thought, being a good Catholic girl and all. Unfortunately, you are supposed to be sorry when you tell the priest your sins and I wasn't sorry at all. I kept thinking of all the little things I had done to fix up my room, arranging everything in just the right place. Now, she was going to mess it all up. There's not much I can do about it, I guess, but I'm not going to like it.
She arrived the next Sunday. Everyone made a great fuss over her and that made me a little sick. When my mom introduced us, Aunt Ann smiled at me. I just looked down at my shoes and mumbled, "hello." Mom showed her to her room. It is not her room, I thought. It is my room! I was walking away when she said, "Gwen, honey, would y'all show me your room? I know if this was my room, I'd have a hard time sharing it with some old Aunt from Texas." I looked up at her, suspiciously, to see if she was smiling that "grown-up" smile that said, "I've got you all figured out." It wasn't there, that smile, she just seemed to be waiting. Well, I wasn't going to give in that easily. I quickly showed her where her drawer was and where to hang her clothes in the closet. Then I said I'd better go help momma. I didn't want to stay too long with her; she might say something nice.
Avoiding the house and all the fuss over Aunt Ann became my mission for the day. I rode my bicycle, climbed trees, hiked around the pasture, swang on the swings—anything to keep from having to go in the house and be nice. From my perch in the barn window, I could see the flurry of activity through the now light-filled windows of the house; all in the service of this interloper. This was a new word I had just read in a book and was trying on for size. I thought it worked nicely. As I sat stewing and building my case against liking my Aunt, I heard some music floating out of the house. At first, it was a trilling of notes and a few tentative chords. Suddenly, strains of a rousing ragtime medley came bursting forth. I recognized these songs as favorites of my mom and dad.
You have to understand something about me. I love music of all kinds. All through my childhood, music was my solace and the expression of all things vital and alive inside of me. If she had been a real witch instead of one only in my imagination, she could not have chosen a better spell to weave around me, to pull me under her spell.
As though by an invisible and gentle tether, those magical notes pulled me slowly out of my hideaway, across the yard and into the music filled house. I couldn't believe it. No one else was anywhere to be found, only Aunt Ann, sitting at the piano, eyes closed, hands like water over pebbles in a brook, first bouncing and jumping then smooth, silky waves of movement. Her body swayed slightly as her foot gently tapped to the beat she created.
I couldn't stop myself. With eyes wide, I hesitantly approached the side of the piano, mesmerized by the sound and sight and beauty of the music. She saw me then, and I started to turn away to avoid the expected rebuff. After all, I had spent the whole day trying to show her how unwelcome she was in my life. She didn't frown or turn away. She just smiled and let her eyes fall to the empty half of the piano bench beside her. When she looked up she winked and went back to her music without missing a beat. It was all the invitation I needed. I moved over to the bench and slid on, careful not to bump those magical hands.
We sat there for what seemed like hours, my Aunt and I. And some part of every day of her visit found us sitting next to each other on that hard piano bench. Sometimes we'd sing, seldom did we speak. The music was what we shared.
I couldn't figure out a way to tell her how sorry I was for being mean when she first arrived. What if I told her and she hadn't noticed. Then I would have to explain what I was talking about; an embarrassing prospect to be sure. What if I reminded her and she stopped wanting me to sit with her while she played; too dangerous a thought to consider. Instead, one morning I slipped out early and picked some violets. I arranged them in a jelly jar and when she wasn't in her room, sneaked them onto her bedside table.
That visit was the last time I ever saw my Aunt Ann. She never mentioned those flowers to me, but I'll always remember her, sitting tall and straight at that piano, making her wonderful music, with the little jelly jar of violets sitting jauntily at the end of the keyboard.
I live in a woodland aerie in Marietta Georgia, a recent transplant from the Chicago area of Illinois. I was born and raised in the Midwest, but have traveled in most states of the United States, and to Canada, Ireland, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, and Scotland. I hope to travel more. I have two grown children, who are the joy of my life, a husband who is wise, passionate and patient, and a loving, if slightly quirky family. I am blessed with wonderful friends. I am passionate about many things, most importantly, people, equality, justice, peace and a healthy environment. I am politically active and restless to have more of a positive impact on the world in which I live.
Last updated: 08/13/06