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David Rigsbee

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TALKING POINTS

by David Rigsbee

Reading the autobiography of her
ex-husband, my now-distant friend choked
with sarcasm at the omission of herself
and the children, seeing that as conclusive
evidence of a man, not self-promoting,
but self-erased. During the dinner
at which he had proposed more than
seventy years ago, he kept a cheat sheet
of talking points underneath his napkin
in case the conversation lagged. Thus no
one was surprised when, at his death,
he had left nothing of his estate
to his forbearing survivors, but divided
the dragon’s hoard between the library
and parks, and his late-life, buxom
caretaker spouse. It was pure Groucho
in the obviousness of it, but disbelief,
like belief, boils the frog slowly. At the end,
his sixty-year-old children still craved
love’s table crumbs, but he who had made
of himself the exception was scarcely
inconvenienced by his own demise.
Surrounded by the attentions of children
still starving for a nod or a touch, he
waved them away to stare at the sea
where he experienced a warm, valedictory fog,
his body released in its brittle turn, showing,
how even at the brink, one could be both
immersed in the wretched longings of others
and blessedly devoid of empathy too.

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David RigsbeeDavid Rigsbee is the author of 19 books and chapbooks, including his new book, School of the Americas, just out from Black Lawrence Press.  His work has appeared in APR, Georgia Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Review, and many others. He is a Pushcart Prize winner for 2012, and earned an NEA Fellowship for Poetry for 2013.

Ric Hoeben

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PICKLE

By Ric Hoeben

There was river birch and there was lilac and then there was first base. Or at least the hole where first base once sat in the red, soft earth had kept, and Scoop stood about and remembered something of it.

And so, also, had he tread the layout of land and all the paths back down to Ball Village with a boy’s instinct, and he could have found the old diamond blindfolded should he have to do it. Without error, he had worked his way through tall grass and ragweed pollen, his science fiction book and notepad sweat-stuck in his one hand, his pimento cheese in the other, and now being here, he crouched himself down for a hesitant bit and finally sat firm and cross-legged among the remains of first base, where he had once played it long and lank.

Here, where he had stood awaiting zipping grounders like some sort of noble bird, where, too, he’d bucketed up many a tricky egg launched over from third with the quick whiff of his first baseman mitt and then, sheepish, he’d look out and find his three coaches lounging, oat-rubbing, yonder at their farside dugout, the three of them shouting it: “Yeah, get ‘em, Scoop—way to go, big Scoop!”

That whole world here was now dead.

He’d got in his Chevy wagon and come back. It was some two hundred miles away from home, but what does it matter—he figured—when you’ve got to become the best science fiction writer alive, and he had, after all, stood there in the giant bookstore and read for a couple of Sunday hours the heaps of material, all of it about becoming one of the worthies, one of the respectable kind of good real sci-fi writers, and he had thought that the one writer man’s advice about recalling his favorite childhood spot and then going straight there after it, no matter the obstacles, would have him in tune with everything needing tune-up, and that then the writing would begin to flow like rivers and the whole world would soon be seeing his novels and all the films, and people would think Scoop Malone really had something good and new and undiscovered on supraterrestials and time dilation and all the other kinds of topics he had read up on when he was meant to be dispersing and delivering mail throughout his work building.

It was some twenty years ago, all that life that was here. He could see Josh Greene’s blasting home run still sailing over the left field scoreboard—now nothing but rusted poles and faded words—and he saw another night, a night when Rodney Brown dove over the centerfield gate to catch a homer and save their big division win, Rodney’s royal blue ballpants snagging along the simple yard-fence and the streams of blood coursing down his thighs when back in the dugout. Eating his pimento cheese and his crackers, Scoop presently thought about all those boys and where they could have gone off to, recollecting the few pieces of what he did know: some were in prison, some had made it in money, some were dead, some were Marines, and some had actually gone to college like he had at Carver Community. All them boys of yesteryear.

His white socks had turned a bit brown from the dirt, and he picked off a few sandspurs from them, brushed them white again, and then, finally, he felt good, calm, undistracted—calm enough to get down to the serious business of writing. He aimed to do to science fiction what Waylon Jennings had done to country music.

There were a few ideas competing in his head and he hoped Strange Horizons would like whatever he finally chose to start on, for his first goal was to get himself into Strange Horizons and then—and only then—start working on Asimov’s and the other giants.

He scribbled out a few good sentences, swatted away gnats while at it, and then realized it was much too hot for it, for writing. His tight denim jeans were chaffing hard against last week’s mosquitoes bites, the sensitive ones flecked all along the insides of his legs, and his brow had turned liquid, while his five-day beard seemed to sting its way right through his face. He had no towel to wipe himself with. The gun bulging in his denim aggravated him as well. He had brought along the little blued .38 in case there were problems, because at Ball Village, at least historically, there were always problems, and Scoop wanted no unnatural interference with his science-fiction making and his big shot at Strange Horizons. He’d kill a man if he had to.

*

Soon as Scoop woke up he immediately hated himself for the dozing. His giant black wristwatch read: 3:05, 105º. Hot as hell. His arms now redder, sandspurs all over him, he brushed and grimaced and tried to reconfigure. His sci-fi model book had crept over some ten yards closer to the dugout—how so, he knew not, as there was certainly no wind, because any wind would have been God’s blessing.

The dugout. Yes, he’d kissed up different girls there. Flat-chested kind of girls, though one of them had big—real big—tanned sort of nice breasts—he missed hard the feel of animal suckings; he had no woman, no wife, and somehow he had been more attractive back at 12 than at 32. He hadn’t sucked a breast in years. He needed to get published for that. He had to write. The women would come, they would come, just write it, damnit, he thought. But he needed water first—first thing was water, then Strange Horizons, then Asimov’s—and there was a fountain at the junkyard yonder and a soda machine, too—an updated one now—way over there behind centerfield—past the gate where little Rodney had done his heroic dive, past the street where homers sometimes bounced around and where an occasional windshield shattered, past all of that and into the live oaks and the cars and trucks of death and decay where only Greene’s big rocket homers could reach.

He was very dehydrated now and he knew it.

*

There was his Chevy wagon out in the gravel and he could take it or he could just walk his way over.

He decided on footing it and trotted his way toward the remains of second base and then toward the leftfield side gate, the outfield grass all along high, and he waded his way past each new discovery: old beers and old Marlboros, a ragged piece of catcher’s vest and plenty of anthills. By the time he actually got to the gate, he’d seen a snake.

The sidegate was rusted, but Scoop was tall enough to leg his way over much like the big television wrestlers could do when on the ring apron. He was getting ever closer to his goal of water, and when crossing by the old ballpark restrooms, he wouldn’t even consider trying out the sip fountain fixtures, as he could well see the outcome of that. Half-determined, he kept on toward the pavement road, looking back a time or two to his sad Chevy van, swimming a little in a hot haze of sun and burgundy paint.

The concession stand suddenly came up upon him. He remembered it fondly, back there tucked behind the reek of public bathroom, because whether his team won or whether his team lost, someone—some kind (of)adult—would be behind the scenes buying red hot dogs and grape snow cones for all the boys. He had outcomed a game many a time when at first base, and depending on win/loss, he’d be the very first in concession stand line or he’d be shuffling clay down at miserable last. Presently he was first and last. And the little place still looked open for business.

And there was one of them—one of the Vandals. Vandallys; he remembered their real name only secondarily. The junkyard owners, the family with his water, the Vandallys.

Timothy Vandally was the only one who had ever come over and signed up to be on a Dixie League team; he was obvious plain white trash and smoked and was only 10 then, whereas Scoop and the others were maybe 11-13. And now, here, was another of the Vandallys, perched in the concession stand, writing down something the other—maybe drawing—on a legal pad slung over the sidebar of the tiny canteen.

Scoop inched closer to the cinder block hut and toward the open window where whatever Vandally leaned himself forth. The plywood window was well propped and tacked to holes within the whitewash, and certainly it was a Vandally writing something down, definitely a Vandally all grown up now—Scoop could tell by the nose and the cheap scowl—probably not Timothy, didn’t look much like Timothy had, but this was some twenty years on fast-forward.

Scoop looked up and down the slant of sidebar menus and all the familiar plug-in letters on all the familiar faded Pepsi signs still read: snow cones, $1.00 (out of lemon); hot dogs, 75 cents; chewing gum, 5 cents apiece. Assorted potato chips and other cavity-getters advertised themselves as well, but Scoop simply wanted cool, cool ice water and he told whatever Vandally now before him just as much.

Slowly the man looked up and met with him. He was dressed like a golfer, or at least as a man in golfing clothes taken from Salvation Army racks; he had car grease all about him, and Scoop remembered that every Vandally of his boyhood memory had looked more or less the same as he, the one now before him: raven black hair, olive complexion, golf tatters, and all their streaks of motor oil and all their streaks of earth. None of the Vandallys had probably ever even actually played golf. But they might have owned some clubs. Packrats, menaces, Scoop thought, yes, their carport had known some golf clubs now and then.

“Water?!” the man shouted at him, as if he’d tried to twice before. “Ain’t no water. Water ain’t no money.” He went back to scribbling down his letters, did the greasy Vandally.

“But I’m thirsty, friend,” Scoop pleaded.

“I sell liquor and sin and isn’t but one of them liquefied. So you tell me how it’s going to be, man.”

“What you working on, Vandally? You an artist now?”

“Just writing. Aim to be a science fiction writer. You ever read anything, brother?”

“I’ve been trying to write a little something out there in the field myself, out there behind first base. A man in the advice books says you’re supposed to find your favorite childhood spot.”

“Shit. That’s real stupid.”

“Well, it was flowing fine for me. Just a bit too hot today. Which is why I intend for that water, see?”

“I ain’t got no water in here, idiot. We can trek it over to the house, and I might let you use one of the hoses.”

“Good stuff, man.” Scoop said affectedly. “You really even get many customers out here?”

“Be quiet, brother. I’ve got an idea about the old Pauli exclusion principle and I want it right here up front in my second chapter, so you’re gonna have to shut your fuckin’ trap, at least till I’m good and ready.”

“I was thinking about humans and a comparison to Brownian movements—you understand what that is, right?”

“Man, you better shut the fuck up or I’ll shotgun the fuck out of your head. I don’t give a shit.”

Scoop tapped at his denim-covered .38 for a little mental security. “Just trying to share ideas,” he said. He thought again of his work and how good it was going to be. “Say, you read Strange Horizons? I should be getting in there real soon.”

“Right.”

“And then maybe Asimov’s.”

“You’d be dead before either, Heinlein, if you don’t shut the fuck up. I have more guns back here than an armory and I’d blast your head into pieces and serve it over grape snow cones for all six of my lil’ nephews.”

“Six nephews! That’s a goddamn heap; I don’t have a single nephew.”

“Do you have a sister?”

“Nope,” Scoop said proudly.

“Dumbass.”

“Well, have you ever been published, Vandally?”

“Yep. By using a penname, too. Several of them actually. My agent advised it, and I saw his meaning right off.”

“Tell me one of them—I read so many of them, and I might would know it.”

“No, you’re going to be quiet or you’re going to die—it’s real simple our logic out here. Where the hell you from, anyway?”

“Mapleton. Upstate.”

“Hmm. Nice cunts up there.”

“Come on and tell me one of your pennames already. Please, man. Else I’m going to consider you a liar.”

“Well, then, let me just drop everything I’m doing here. Okay? I’m coming right down there in a minute to tell you all about it. Just hold on. Okay, my friend?”

*

The lot of them stood there as if waiting for something to come and happen to them; bored, outside, waiting in the golf clothes and in the grease among humanity’s forgotten Chevrolets and Fords, young ones and old ones, all of them Vandallys, all of them crossarmed and seemingly protecting the crumbles of their light brick house and the carport of arcade games, computers, and whole rows of washer/dryer sets.

One shaven-head boy twirled a computer mouse, snarling a bit with it as he looked up at Scoop Malone.

Concession-stand Vandally smiled down at the boy—he presumably one of the little six.

“Jacob, you wanna choke this Mapleton man with that there mouse cord—well, I might let you if you act real good today for Uncle Richard.”

Some of the older Vandallys smiled, and Scoop made out which one Timothy was. He was certain of it.

“Come on, stranger,” said Uncle Richard.

Scoop wished he hadn’t left the canteen with the man now.

“Yes, come on,” he repeated. “Yonder stands your trampoline. I don’t think you’ll want to pick that. Think of all those big springs there circling around it, my friend. Don’t they just look giant—even from here?”

The six nephew boys, in chorus, broke apart and giggled and then spun themselves around in the dirt-dust driveway, all good fun to them. Some of the smaller ones were thumbsuckers, and the older ones of them pointed to the trampoline with some level of understanding.

“And so,” Richard Vandally continued, “you’re probably gonna want to stick with these here cars and what we call a Jam-Slammer. Or Toomer could get out one of his Samurai swords—no, no, let’s not do that today, goddamnit. Sorry, my Toomer.”

The squat Vandally to Richard’s immediate left flank sighed, he being irritated somewhat, or so it appeared.

“Now come over here to this Buick, you little Mapleton bitch. Edgar, you and Tim drag him on over here.”

Up came spots of mound and patches of weed grass for them to maneuver through and so get nigh the rusting Buick in all its after-market aubergine glory. Only the computer mouse kid, the smallest of them there, could easily dart his way ahead, and he had done so, and there he had opened up the driver’s side door and then swung his merry way over it, back and forth, creak-squeak, his head poking out through the open window.

And it was all the sudden like that Richard had Scoop’s hand deep within his own. Richard’s arm was meaty, hairy, and red-dimpled in a few spots, and Scoop thought to himself that it was a man’s hand, like his own father’s had been.

“Now what we’re gonna do is not hard to understand,” Richard continued his show.

“I’m going to ask you questions—easy, real easy questions—and if you answer right, you’ll be okay. Now get to squattin’ down. Come on, Mapleton.”

Scoop knelt in the mix of weeds and dirt and anthill, with some reluctance, and looked back up toward his sudden master and asked of him: “And what if I answer wrongly?”

“Then this will happen!”

The smarting kind of human pain that shot up through Scoop’s fingers was something unbearable. His pale, boney claws immediately broke out into a spreading fire and he sucked his tongue back to keep from crying in front of all the gathered men.

“Don’t even try to inch it away,” the looming presence of Timothy Vandally added. Richard held Scoop’s red hand again at the spot of air between the door and the doorjamb and creaked the Buick’s wing back toward his own waist. Scoop still knelt and looked downward to the grit of earth below him.

“Tell me this, then, friend. Who is the greatest—who is the finest Science Fiction writer in the state?”

“That’d be hard for me to say,” Scoop said, nervously.

Then the door creaked a tad and slammed forward, up against his palm once again.

Scoop stifled the scream that he really wanted as he fell down flat upon the dirt. He had never known anything quite like this.

“Fuckin’ fool,” the littlest boy said, rat-tailed and proud, as he twirled his toy around the big clouds of sky above. Back on his knees, Scoop was eye-level with the kid again, and he wanted to reach out and choke him with his red throb of hands, but he knew the consequences would be very mortal.

“Tell me now,” Richard barked, “and you use a different answer this time.”

“Richard,” Scoop muttered. “You are, truly, the best science fiction writer of all, Richard Vandally. You and you alone. No one else out there even close.”

“That ain’t my published name, you fuck.”

Once more the door creaked forth and sunk an attack into Scoop’s flesh. He bit down fast on his bottom lip. He could barely talk now:

“I don’t know your pennames. You wouldn’t give them.”

“Well, you won’t find any of them in that Strange Horizons shit of yours, but once you get back up to Mapleton you better had find them where they do be. I’ll give you one easy, man. John Jammer. You look up that name some time, you little shit.” He then kicked Scoop square in the jeans and some amount of dust did fly.

And then he spat upon him.

“Get back on your knees. Who said we were finished here?”

The little one still spun his lasso. He never seemed to tire with it or diminish, and Scoop, dizzy, had never longed for water so bad in his whole existence, so he risked asking after it again.

“Oh,” Richard Vandally remarked. “I did forget about your water. Are the hoses up and running, Toomer?”

Toomer and Edgar shook their heads from side to side. Gnats had at some point gathered around on everybody, but no one was swatting now.

“Hmm, and a shame.” Richard crept up behind his favorite nephew and stopped him from all his twirl, and then he whispered way down into his hearing. And Scoop, before he could realize what was happening in real-time, Scoop, an awful kind of haggard, sensed the definite enough taste of brine within his mouth, and he saw the pearly, joker giggle of the little one positioned before him, and then the boy was all quick-like, pulling his cotton shorts back up high over his crust of belly button.

All the other Vandallys gave themselves over to roaring and enjoying life and so on.

Scoop stole a look for himself; it was a hard look back toward the ball diamond, and he thought he could see something of his one and only homer during those boy years. It was a blast—a blast on par with Josh Greene’s best, and it had crossed the road and the big rumor for that day had been that the ball had met with the windshield of one of the Vandally’s Plymouths.

And when now scanning behind the home plate area, Scoop could just make out the tiny speck of his burgundy Chevy van and he wanted home, he wanted Mapleton, and he wanted to be smiling and delivering mail to all the cubicle people on the four floors of his work. But here he was with his hands tied. Edgar was approaching for his own try with him, but Timothy roughhoused and earned his way out in front. Timothy would be next then. Timothy had always hated the ringleader in Josh Greene, and that was a fact. Timothy had daydreamed those games away out in right field while Josh Greene held down third with some kind of golden precision.

Scoop, now sitting with his back against the Buick’s aubergine midsection and his dead arm flung out space-side, offered up his hand to Timothy Vandally. He could soak it real good whenever he got home. He’d get up and would go to work in the morning and he would work hard and he would forget about Asimov’s and all his ridiculous hoping against hope. He was very behind at work. But for now, Timothy was tugging his red hand on closer to the slow squeak of car door, while the tiny mouse boy ran crazed around the live oaks, he looking just like Timmy had once looked, Timothy Vandally who had hated smooth Josh Greene and all his flairing it up at third. Scoop had even kind of envied third base sometimes himself; he had hated being so tall, had hated being sort of stuck with his task— which the three coaches had made seem so obvious then—and he had even hated “Scoop,” but now, with his hand firmly put inside Timothy’s, he could see something of Josh Greene, far, far away from his third base post, far away and in Marine’s fatigues, being made some stranger in a strange land, and Scoop looked back up to this Vandally in control at the present moment, he standing there all ready to take his first big swing, and Scoop Malone, these twenty-odd years later, was now very glad he had played first base for all of those seasons.

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Ric Hoeben homes it in eastern South Carolina, holds an MFA from the University of Florida, and hopes his recently finished literary crime novel, Oceans of Gold, will be a real smash.

Deborah Rudacille

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SOUTHERN GOTHIC

by Deborah Rudacille

A man named Knuckles is running for sheriff of the Florida county where my Uncle Al settled after he retired from the Air Force in 1971. The current sheriff is named Slaughter. My aunt and cousins were bemused by my exclamations of glee over these Dickensian surnames when I visited in July. But I was snatching at any excuse to lighten the atmosphere as the occasion for the trip was a sad one: I was accompanying my 79-year-old mother on a last visit to her big brother, confined to a hospital bed and slipping in and out of consciousness since a mini-stroke earlier in the month.

Uncle Al had been on home hospice for inoperable lung cancer since February, but up till his 82nd birthday in June he had been tooling around town in his Jazzy, able-bodied enough to rise and hit a few golf balls at a course near his home every few days. The stroke felled him in a way that cancer and chemo couldn’t, paralyzing the left side of his body. It was clear to all of us that my mom had better fly down quickly if she wanted to see him while he was still able to talk with her.

So in mid-July my cousin Tom claimed my mother and me at the Jacksonville airport, driving us down the pine-fringed highways to Trenton, a one traffic light town in the rural north central region of the state. It was an odd place for my uncle to have put down roots. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Baltimore, he had enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War, serving in the war zone though not on the front lines.

Over a twenty-year career as a USAF radioman he had lived in Alaska, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. In one of the murkier phases of his career, he had served as a member of a five-man “secret Air Force” team monitoring nuclear tests from Chile prior to the election of the socialist Allende government in the mid-sixties. But my aunt had been raised in Florida, and her parents, brother, and sister lived near Trenton, so my cosmopolitan uncle settled near his wife’s family like a good husband. As a dark-skinned Italian with a name that ended in a vowel, he didn’t exactly blend.

When I was a kid, my parents, brother, and I road-tripped south every couple of summers to visit them, stopping overnight in South Carolina to break up the sixteen-hour drive from Baltimore. Swimming in a motel pool the first night of the trip was a treat, but merely a tantalizing appetizer for the main event—meeting up with Uncle Al, Aunt Peggy, Michael, and Tom in Trenton and together hitting all the Florida attractions within a couple hours’ drive of their home. My brother and I marveled at the curvaceous mermaids at Weeki Wachi and glided over crystal waters in glass-bottomed boats in Silver Springs, a “nature theme park” in Ocala. And of course, we screamed in the Haunted Mansion and giggled through Mister Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World.

But we had just as much fun swimming in the snake-infested waters at Hart Springs and tubing lazily down the Itchnetucknee River near Trenton. My brother was even brave enough to try water-skiing in the river till my cousins told him to hail them with a wave if he saw a gator slide into the water. After a face-saving spin on the skis he hopped right back into the boat.

Once we hit adolescence my slightly older cousin Michael and I discovered other shared interests. Soon after my family pulled into Trenton in “Old Paint,” our family Chevy, Michael would say, “want to take a ride, Debbie?” and we would jump into his battered pickup truck. Driving down some long dusty country road bordered by watermelon fields, we’d see another pickup filled with his friends in the distance, stop side by side and pass a joint back and forth between the trucks. Michael always introduced me as his “Yankee” cousin and teased me about how fast I talked. On one memorable occasion when our families were vacationing together in Fort Walton Beach on Florida’s Gulf panhandle, Michael proposed drinking Kool-Aid mixed with the juice of psilocybin mushrooms before a family dinner at Howard Johnsons. After dinner we took our little brothers to see The Deep with Jacqueline Bisset and laughed through the whole movie, which was not a comedy.

Those were halcyon days to be sure, and a lot more fun than our latest meeting, which was shadowed by my uncle’s looming death, which none of us could bring ourselves to acknowledge. Instead, we sat in the living room, where his hospital bed faced the big flat screen television, and urged him to drink water from the pink and purple sippy cup I bought him at the Dollar General as he could no longer drink from a regular cup without spilling. We worked in teams to turn his emaciated body from side to side to ward off bedsores. We brought him back mashed potatoes from the barbecue joint where we went to dinner and cheered when he took a few bites.

And we talked politics. On the ride down from Jacksonville, my cousin Tom, a budget analyst for the Florida Department of Corrections, had pointed out four razor-wired prisons on the highway between Jacksonville and Trenton. The prison system is one of the top employers in North Florida, he told my mom and me. But the Republican governor and legislature are itching to privatize corrections and he is worried about his job. “I’ll have thirty years service next year,” he said, sitting in his dad’s wheelchair, which has become just another sitting option in the living room. “But I don’t think I’ll be around for forty.” Like his dad, who retired from the Air Force at forty-one, Tom is pretty sure he’ll have a second career doing something else. Though he never said so, I’m pretty sure he will be voting for the Democratic ticket this fall.

Meantime, Michael works for one of the few manufacturers left in Florida, making boats. He’s been there for twenty-eight years but is worried about how he’ll pay the bills when he has to take off for a couple of months following surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. He doesn’t have disability insurance and doubts that he will be able to get workmen’s comp, though it is clear that the injury is caused by years of hard physical labor. His wife is worried that if he takes time off, his employers will fire him. Nonetheless, he is planning to vote for Mitt Romney because, he says, “he fixed Massachusetts.”

Tom says that Florida was a solidly Democratic state for decades, but that battles over abortion and gay rights pushed the state into the Republican camp. I wondered aloud how that could be. My aunt, a Republican who used to work for the Board of Elections, said that the state’s Democrats no longer felt at home in the party. “The party left them,” she said. “They didn’t leave the party.”

My uncle, a lifelong Democrat, roused himself to croak a single word—“Dixiecrats”—before slipping back into dreams.

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Deborah Rudacille is an independent journalist and science writer. Her first book, The Scalpel and the Butterfly (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), was named one of the year’s best nonfiction books by the Los Angeles Times. The Riddle of Gender (Pantheon, 2004) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her latest book, Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town will be published in January 2010. She teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Marion Winik

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MY LIFE IN THERAPY

by Marion Winik

Not long after I moved to Baltimore in 2009, I realized that I needed help. I was still a mess about the implosion of my marriage, I was having no luck with dating, and neither hot yoga, white wine, or what was left in the prescription bottle from the last time I sprained my ankle was killing the pain. However, having been in therapy on and off since seventh grade, I knew well that finding a therapist is no easier than finding a boyfriend and often “help” is not a good description of what you get.

The first psychiatrist I ever saw was a Chinese-American woman with a son in my middle-school honors science class. I was sent to her after I wrote a long, spooky, cry-for-help type poem and swallowed a bottle of Excedrin. A C- in seventh-grade English (I think we would now call this a Jewish F) and a broken heart were the nominal causes of my nervous collapse but I was also fascinated by mental illness as portrayed in books like I Never Promised You A Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. Ah, that Sylvia Plath. An ongoing danger to America’s young romantics.

I would later realize that by limiting her responses to mmhmm-mmhmm and tossing any question I asked back to me, my inscrutable therapist was following classic psychoanalytic procedures. At the time I thought she was one of the most annoying people I’d ever met. To her credit, she did manage to explain some of my self-esteem issues to my bewildered parents, who were as always just trying to help me. But the approximately fourteen doctors I was seeing at the time, including a speech therapist, were making me feel like The Elephant Man instead of just a somewhat chubby, slightly pigeon-toed, crooked-toothed, lazy-eyed preteen. The physical issues were all eventually fixed or went away on their own; my sad little soul would prove more intractable.

My teen years featured an old-hippie psychologist my sister Nancy and I both saw, sometimes together. He said we should bring as many of friends as we liked. He smoked bidis with us—Indian clove cigarettes rolled in leaves, very popular in the ’70s—and hypnotized me to help me lose weight. One session involved me descending into an imaginary theater and visualizing my favorite food making an entrance on the spotlit stage. My favorite food was Dannon vanilla yogurt.

He explained to me that this symbolized the male orgasm.

Also around this time I participated in a therapy group run by the mother of one of my high school friends in her basement. Grassroots-style group therapy was quite a craze back then, as were bean bag chairs, blond-veneer paneling and shag carpeting, and everyone in our drama-club clique crowded down the stairs to the bi-weekly meetings, not wanting to miss a moment of the action. “Group,” as it was known, was less like therapy than like an MTV reality show thirty years before its time, with all the parties to every slight and betrayal on hand for its confession, a domino-effect freak-out waiting to happen.

For example, when I stupidly messed around one night in a red Chevy Nova with Billy Donnelley, who was not my boyfriend but who reportedly had porn-star type anatomical equipment so often discussed by the boys in our crowd that it was difficult not to be curious about it, the big showdown occurred in a room that contained Billy, my boyfriend, me, all of our various siblings, other girls who had had indiscretions with Billy Donnelley, their menfolk, and our well-meaning, middle-aged group leader. Though Billy and I had not gone all the way, things were never the same again for me and my sweet, young boyfriend. Ah, those stupid ’70s. Like Sylvia Plath, another wellspring of dubious inspiration and poor moral guidance.

In college, where I had developed a pioneering case of bulimia, I saw a Student Health psychiatrist who made me so mad with his insistence that my eating problem was really a sexuality problem that I threw my purse at him in our second session. I was a little edgy after the vanilla yogurt thing.

Still I wasn’t completely discouraged, though I continued to have meager success. More obsessive love, more body image issues, now throw in substance abuse . . . in my twenties, I practically drove a young Jungian therapist into another line of work. I was losing patience, too. At one point, I actually threatened to sue a guy who listened to me for a couple hours, diagnosed me with ADD, wrote me three prescriptions, and sent me a bill for $1,369. Multiple couples counselors threw up their hands at both my first and second marriages. When I started to believe one of my kids was a dangerously manipulative charmer who had everyone around him bewitched with his lies, I of course sent him to see a therapist as well. She called me after a few visits to tell me that I shouldn’t worry about my son. Everybody lies a little! And he was so charming.

Unbelievably, none of these experiences had destroyed my faith in therapy and so I set out once again to be healed, this time in the living room of an elderly, cadaverous, former Episcopal priest whose main advantage was that he was right in my neighborhood. On our first visit, he said he wasn’t sure he could help me with my problems, since they were so severe. On our second visit, he decided he’d rather not hear the pages and pages of dreams I had written down at his suggestion (though they seemed at the very least to be full of lottery number picks.) On our third visit, he pulled out his Bible and started reading aloud. When I called him the following week to cancel our next appointment, I got the impression I had barely beaten him to it.

Then I sprained my ankle for the third time that fall, and my friend Ken insisted I go the emergency room. Against my better judgment, I let Ken drag me to Patient First. While we were waiting I noticed a paperback copy of the book Desire, a memoir of sex addiction by Susan Cheever, on the chair beside me, atop a crocheted blue shawl. I picked it up to see if they had used a quote from the review I’d written of the book. They hadn’t, and I put the book back. Who was the person who had left it there, I wondered. When a friendly-looking, blond, blue-eyed woman gingerly carrying her hurt left arm in her right returned to claim her things, I told her I had looked at her book.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m a therapist!”—obviously wanting to dispel the impression that she was reading it because she was a sex addict.

“And I,” I quickly replied, “am a book reviewer.”

She was taken away to have her arm fixed. But as I sat there, I thought about the woman, feeling more and more drawn to her. This, I was sure, was my therapist. So I sneaked down the hall and peeked in the cracks between the curtains of the treatment rooms until I found her. She and her attending physician looked up surprised as I boldly swept in. “Can I have your business card?” I said.

I saw Tracy on Tuesdays, right after my hot yoga class. We talked about my ex-husband, of course, whose anger and blame were still very live issues for me, and about my recent bad experiences with the race-car driver in Annapolis. This seemed to exemplify another disastrous element of my character: the power of good looks and good kissing to blow my circuits. One does get to a point in life where it’s sort of exhausting filling in the same old back story, and then even more discouraging to realize how similar the new stories are. But Tracy was a good listener, neither a pushover nor a super-confrontational critic, and I never had to throw my purse at her once.

God knows I have always been too restless and impulsive and impatient for my own good, sometimes drastically so, and I have long suffered with the burning desire to climb out of my head and go someplace else, often with some sort of chemical assistance. While motherhood has made me a much healthier person—as it couldn’t Sylvia Plath—it didn’t fix every glitch. Tracy wouldn’t either, but she did help me out of the post-marital pain pit and onto more solid ground. I miss her, which is more than I can say for most of my old pay-pals.

Just like love, therapy is always worth another try.

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Marion WinikMarion Winik is best known for her commentaries on All Things Considered since 1991 (collected at NPR.org) and is the author of eight books, including First Comes Love, The Lunchbox Chronicles, Telling, and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. She is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and an expert on the ethics of creative nonfiction. A performer in the tradition of David Sedaris, she has read from her work in large and small venues all over the country. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore and writes the Answer Lady advice column for Ladies Home Journal.

Derrick Austin

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SYRINX

by Derrick Austin

We are a song without a chorus. His fingers flutter
over the valves: crescendo, crescendo, crescendo,

legato. Outside, evening’s sulfur blows 
off the marsh where herons rest, white fires on dead trees. 

In my dream, I am the reed he plays. 
Water lettuces haul their skirts, twirling in the undertow.

Palmettos fan toads, squat in green velour,
and herons in their white suits quicken. In my dream, 

I am the reed he cuts. He teaches me to howl. 
I can’t tell the music from the knife, the moon, his teeth.

He carves new registers and plays a song that lights the air—
blood on a wing, a splash, the moon’s

staccato, toads lashing what flies closest
to their mouths—then goes as water rushing off the sedge.

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Derrick AustinDerrick Austin is an assistant poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming inKnockout, Waccamaw, Crab Orchard Review, storySouth, and other journals. He won the 2011 Editorial Prize Contest sponsored by Tidal Basin Review and will be pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan this fall.