Second Verse

Margie had tried every diet out there. The Scarsborough Diet, Atkins, Flat Belly, Wheat Belly, Hawaiin, Paleo, Gluten-Free, Fat-Free, Low Cal - you name it. She’d started dieting in the early 80s when a friend passed her a handwritten copy of The Cabbage Soup Diet after Jazzercise class.

“Eight banana milkshakes on Day 4? Are you sure?,” she’d asked her friend.

“And all the cabbage soup you can eat!” her friend replied with glee.

It turned out that Margie could only eat a minimal amount of cabbage soup before her farts forced her to isolate herself from friend and foe alike. She did lose seven pounds that week, so it wasn’t a total loss.

The diets always worked; she’d drop twenty pounds, buy a new wardrobe, then promptly gain thirty. She went from self loathing to maniacally enthusiastic with dizzying speed, and soon her friends learned to just smile and nod whenever she began talking about the latest diet fad. Oh, you know that Margie!, they’d say to each other and roll their eyes. They didn’t really mind that little bit of craziness, because everyone loved Margie.

It was hard not to. She walked into a room like a gift, wrapped up in a velour sweatsuit and a dozen bangle bracelets. She wore too much makeup and too much hairspray and laughed too loud. She was a little embarrassing at times. She ordered her food in the accent of whatever country the dish originated in - Mexican for enchiladas, Southern for fried chicken, Chinese for lo mein noodles. Margie was a born and bred midwesterner (“You can take the girl out of the Heartland, but you can’t take the Heartland out of the girl!”, she liked to say), so the accents were always cringeworthy. But she charmed everyone with a smile and a wink, and no one seemed to mind too much.

Margie wasn’t married, and her friends could never quite get the full story of her past. “There was a man,” she’d say, lowering her voice to a whisper and cutting her eyes. But she never said more, and when pressed she’d change the subject. What kind of man could have that effect on Margie?, they wondered, and agreed that regardless, he didn’t deserve her.

Margie belonged to the local Lutheran church, she volunteered at the hospital and was a reading buddy at the elementary school. She hosted a monthly supper club and was at Jazzercise twice a week, without fail. She had a host of friends and a full schedule, but still went home to a cramped apartment she shared with her bichon frise, Malcolm. Malcolm had been her mother’s until her death, and Margie inherited the dog along with the apartment. He was an ancient and grizzled ball of fur, who seemed to wake just long enough to eat and use the bathroom. Too old to handle stairs and too lazy to play, his toileting was contained to a small square of astroturf on the balcony. Every day when Margie woke, she stared at the dog on his pillow, trying to discern if he was breathing. Every day she would think, “Oh, he’s dead!” only to be startled by a sudden, ragged snore. She was always a little disappointed.

Margie was, despite outside appearances, terrifically lonely. At home, she led a painfully mundane existence - eat, take Malcolm to the bathroom, watch TV, try to sleep. She’d complained to a young mother in Jazzercise about her sleeping problems and been shocked when, the very next week, the woman came to class with a small cello bag of Xanax and a pill bottle full of marijuana.

“This will fix you up!,” the woman whispered.

Margie hadn’t known what to say, so she stuffed the drugs in her purse. She sat them on the counter and stared at them for a long time. She didn’t even know how to smoke marijuana! Didn’t you need to make it into cigarettes? She had some post-it notes, but had a feeling that wouldn’t work. After an extensive search on the internet and repeated viewing of a You Tube video from a young man named weedman420, she fashioned a rudimentary pipe out of a soda can and tin foil.

She nearly vomited after inhaling. Weedman420 had suggested a deep, hard, fast draw on the ‘pipe’, and Margie always followed directions. She’d never even smoked cigarettes, so the sharpness of the smoke penetrating her lungs was unexpectedly painful. The second puff was considerably easier, and by the fourth she downright digging it.

She scrambled eggs and made chocolate milk and giggled at Malcolm twitching in his sleep. She had a sudden and overwhelming urge to dress him up like Elvis Presley and spent thirty minutes trying to make a wig out of clothespins and felt before she forgot what it was that she was doing.

There was a noise. It was a not unfamiliar sound; the sound of a person trying not to make a sound. Margie stood perfectly still, the hairs on the back of her neck at attention. She could hear her own ragged breath and willed it to be quieter. Stop beating, heart! Stop breathing nose! Stop rushing, blood! She thought she heard the sound again, but wasn’t sure. She became convinced, standing there in her living room, that someone was in the apartment. Someone other than her and her comatose dog and Weedman420, frozen on the computer screen.

She had to get help.

                                      

First Chapters

The men have been here since before dawn, and they break for lunch well before noon. If it is hot, like today, they will find shade under the magnolia tree in the front yard. If it is cool, like it will be before this job is done, they fold down the tailgate of the work truck and sit side-by-side like birds on a rail.

They are men of indeterminate age, all brown from heritage or work, unclear until you hear them speak. They open their Igloo coolers in the shade of the tree and set out the items, eyeing their neighbor and judging the happiness of the home based on the content of the cooler. One man unwraps a wad of foil to expose golden, greasy, glistening fried chicken from last night’s supper. Clearly, he is loved. Bread and butter sandwiches and August’s tomatoes, thick slices of ham on white bread, wrapped in wax paper with neatly folded seams. A half dozen noses wrinkle in unison at tuna fish.

Peanut butter between saltine crackers and fried pies and carnitas and tortillas. Long draws from mason jars filled with sweet tea or glass bottles of coke. There is half a yellow cake with chocolate icing that one man pulls from his cooler like a magician. The paper plate it’s on strains and it looks like it might give way under the weight, but then it is safe on the ground. The bringer of the cake cuts it into generous slices and the men eat it with their hands in silence. It is likely the best cake ever eaten under a magnolia tree.

There are never leftovers. Wrappers are folded inside of wax, inside of foil, into packets and back into the coolers. The men never litter; they pack away trash with the same care their wives and daughters packed the feast. With gratitude.

Some of the men smoke. They take long draws on short cigarettes and pick bits of tobacco from their lips with their fingertips. Someone tells a dirty joke and, even though they’ve all heard it before, the men laugh. One of them leans back against a tree and pretends to sleep.

A young woman with a sharp face is jogging and catches sight of them. She makes quick judgments and crosses the street before she reaches them, being careful not to make eye contact. The men laugh, and she thinks they are laughing at her. They are.     

Carolyn hated to run. She hated the tight feeling in her chest when it was cold, and the feeling of running through pea soup when it was hot. She hated her breasts smashed tight to her chest and yet still managing to bounce enough that she wanted to wrap her arms around them. She hated the swish swish swish of her thighs fighting each other with every step.

“You should take up jogging,” her therapist said. “It will alleviate stress! Release those endorphins!” The therapist was a whippet of a woman, not a day under seventy, with beef jerky skin and teeth that were too big for her mouth.

Because she knew that she had to do something to pull herself back from the edge, and because she was far too mundane to try sex or drugs, Carolyn started running. The therapist was right - for an hour every day, running emptied her mind of everything. She hated running so much, it took all her will just to get one foot in front of the other. She could concentrate on nothing more than the square of asphalt under her.

It was on this square that her eyes were focused when she approached the men. She glanced up for a moment and there they were; sprawled out on the lawn, brown and sweaty and laughing. Carolyn had split second internal battle between street smart woman who always crosses the road to avoid a group of men and liberal white privilege guilt dictates I should never judge based on stereotypes. In the end, fear overruled guilt and she cut hard to the right to cross in the middle of the street. She came off the curb awkwardly and stumbled, just missing a fall. She heard the men laugh and felt her face flush. She ran faster, silently shaming herself home.

She was nearly calm by the time she reached the front door of her apartment, though she knew she’d replay the scene over in her head countless times over the next week. It was a habit she couldn’t seem to break, even after all the therapy. Did I really do that? What do they think of me? Do they think I’m a bad person? It was an obsession that had cost her friendships, jobs, and countless romantic relationships. Apparently, constantly rehashing the most inane conversations is not a turn on.

Carolyn unlocked the door, went inside, and lay on the living room floor, exhausted. Her cat, Winchester, promptly walked over and sat on her chest. “I hate you,” she glared at the cat and he glared back. If cats were capable of getting a tiny middle paw finger to stand up, Winchester would be flipping her off. The cat had been another fantastic suggestion from the therapist. “A companion!,” she’d said, after Carolyn had mentioned a childhood pet.

The pet had been a dog and, as Carolyn learned approximately fifteen minutes after having the cat - cats are not dogs. Cats are, in general, assholes. The dog she’d had as a young girl had been named Velveeta, after her favorite cheese and seminal ingredient in most of her mother’s dishes. Velveeta followed Carolyn around the house and slept at the foot of her bed, and ran to the end of the driveway every day to meet her as she got off the bus from school. One day, Velveeta wasn’t there and her mother shrugged her shoulders and avoided eye contact. “She just ran off, honey,” was all she’d said.

It wasn’t until Carolyn’s thirtieth birthday that her mother sat her down and told her the truth.

“Mail truck, honey,” she’d said. “Poor Mr. Olsen ran over her and broke her whole back end. Your daddy had to hit her with the shovel three times before…”
“Jesus! MOM!” Carolyn burst into tears, “It’s my birthday!”

She sat in her therapist’s office the next day, telling the story and crying until her nose ran. When the therapist suggested a pet it seemed like a perfectly wonderful idea (and a far better one than running). Carolyn went to the humane society and picked Winchester from the caged rows of desperate felines. The man at the desk had her hold the cat in one hand and a sign proclaiming, Going to My FUR-ever Home!, in the other, as he took a Poloroid. He blew on the picture and fanned it, then hung it on a corkboard with a hundred other such photos. In each one, the new owners looked excited and the animal looked relieved. In Carolyn’s picture, she looked scared and Winchester looked pissed. It was a harbinger of things to come.

The first night, the cat sat by the front door and wailed. Each time Carolyn tried approaching him, he hissed and scratched at the air. By three in the morning, she found her self lying on her belly, inching toward him with a palm full of tuna fish. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, you little asshole.” She inched closer and closer until the cat finally gave in and ate the tuna. He didn’t miss the opportunity to nip her palm when he was done. It was the most intimate moment they would ever share. Carolyn believed in forever homes - or furever homes - which is why, two years later, she lay on the floor with a cat’s ass in her face.

She pushed the cat off her chest and walked into the kitchen. There on the drainboard was one glass, one plate, one bowl, knife and fork. One spoon rested on a permanent brown stain on the counter by the coffee maker. They were the tools of a solitary person, never worth the effort to put away. She filled the glass with water from the tap, drank it down, and turned the glass over to dry. In the fridge she found some questionable Chinese food, three beers, and a hard boiled egg. She ate the food standing in front of the fridge and drank the beers on the couch while watching reruns of Full House. Not for the first time, she wondered how those homely little kids turned out to be such lovely women. Borderline ugly, really, she thought, then immediately felt guilty. She sat through two episodes and then turned the television off. It was Saturday - her day off - and shouldn’t she be doing something productive?

Shouldn’t she be out with friends? Or getting ready for a date? Or doing anything except getting half drunk with her cat? She stared at the door, willing someone - anyone - to knock.

And then someone did.

The Accident

I was ten when my father killed the dog. We’d refer to it later as The Accident but, in the end, the dog was dead and my father was the one who’d killed it.

I sat in the front seat beside him that day, while he drove and sang along with the radio. The trees had just started their slow turn to fall, and the air was warm enough still to have the windows down. I stared at the white blonde hairs on my arm, golden against brown skin. Father squinted his eyes against the sun and the smoke from the Winston balanced on his lower lip. I watched it hang there with its impossible ash, bouncing as he sang, tilting upward and getting swallowed by his mouth as he inhaled. Just when it seemed doomed to drop into his lap and set the whole car on fire, he flicked it out the open window and lit another.

It was between the flicking and the lighting that I saw the dog run down the hill from the farmhouse toward the road.  A giant yellow lab, big and beautiful and stupid, his legs moving faster than his brain, bounding across the gravel road in pursuit of nothing. I don’t know that the dog ever saw the car; I am certain my father never saw the dog. He hit the animal’s hind end, spinning him up and over the hood of the car and onto the side of the road, fast and heavy and without flair. He pulled the car off the shoulder and we sat in confusion and silence.

My father got out first, and slow-jogged to the animal’s side. I hung behind, trying to look without looking. The dog’s tongue pushed through his rattling teeth and he panted and whined as my father muttered, shit, shit, shit. The dog shifted his eyes to his back end, and I saw what he could not – a twisted mess of legs and tail, every bit of it going not at all the right way.

Shit.

“Go back to the car,” Father spoke without turning.

He knelt for a long time with his back to the car, putting his hand gently here and there on the dog. I watched through the back window as he moved in so close that I thought he was hugging the animal. The muscles in his back bulged and tensed under his t-shirt and we both stopped breathing for a moment. Then he relaxed and raised himself from the pavement. He rubbed his face hard with both hands, and knelt again, this time rising with the dog cradled in his arms.

He walked up the long hill to the farmhouse. By the time he returned, I had fallen asleep in the sun, my face pressed into the seat back. He did not speak, but started the car and pulled back on to the road. Loretta Lynn was on the radio.

Blogger Camp!

If there existed an award for Worst Blogger Ever, I would get it. One might think that over the years I would get better at things like SEO optimization and reader engagement and monetization. Instead, I dropped my ads, continue to reply to comments sporadically (at best), and I just recently learned that SEO is not a spinoff band of REO Speedwagon. Which is kind of a relief, because they really suck. 

So, when I get invited to a blogger workshop, I jump at the opportunity. Although I did warn them that if they started talking about boring stuff I was going to zone them out and play Candy Crush. Plus, the workshop was at the YMCA Camp Hanes, which is one of my favorite places, and they were going to offer us a summer camp discount, and give us one for our readers, AND they were going to feed us. Really, all they needed to say was 'free food' and I'd be there. 

I picked up my friend Kristen from Four Hens and a Rooster and Ten to Twenty Parenting in the Big Lots parking lot (true) and drove up Camp on a cool and drizzly morning. Kristen is, among other things, a blogger and social media expert (true) and was going to lead the workshop.  My job was to help out if anyone got stuck on a level of Candy Crush. Let's just say Kristen did all the work that day. 

We were joined by some local bloggers who actually know what they're doing, including Triad Moms on Main, Southern as Biscuits, My Winston-Salem, City Girl on Hicks Farm, You Can't Make This Stuff Up, and AttaGirl Says, as well as The Amazing Jen from Camp Hanes. She is The Amazing Jen because when you say things like - Hey Jen! Can we shoot some stuff after this? She says, "Sure!". Also because she is incredibly well read and geeks out when she gets retweeted by an author. She is my kind of nerd. 

Everyone talked about blogging and I learned several things I will most likely not put into practice. I also said the word 'anus' and made an inappropriate butt sex joke (two separate incidents), so I feel like my contribution was worthwhile and noted. 

Then we got to walk around Camp Hanes and talk about how fantastic it is. If you know me, chances are you know how passionate I am about Camp. My oldest is going into her eighth summer at Camp Hanes, my middle is getting ready for her first. I do not know that I have ever experienced a place, or a group of people, so joyfully committed to helping kids become their best selves through camp. It honestly sounds kind of silly, but I don't know how else to put it. Every summer, I listen to kids talk about how camp makes them mentally, physically, and spiritually stronger. It is transformative, in the very best way. 

Camp Hanes does some really special things for kids - from a camp geared toward kids on the autism spectrum to kids with diabetes, to children of military servicemen  and women. They offer programming year round - corporate team building and reunions, adventure parties for teens and outdoor education for school groups, YMCA day camp and residential camp. This weekend, they even offer a Winter Camp - which, I'm assuming, features lots and lots of s'mores. 

It's moderately priced and they offer discounts for early registration ($100 off before December 31), Y members ($50 off), sibling discounts, and financial aid is available. Additionally, SFC readers get $50 off using the code SUMMERCAMPBLOG. 

OK, you may be saying, sounds like a great place, BUT I LIVE IN RUSSIA! Or, I DONT HAVE KIDS! Or, I'M A HORSE! (That reads blogs, okay, whatever.) But you still want to help out a child who needs that financial aid. There is a button at the top of this page, and also on the Camp Hanes website, about the Send a Kid to Camp program. And right now, a generous private benefactor is matching all new donations, dollar for dollar, up to $50,000. So, if you give $1, it will be matched for a total of $2, and you've helped a kid enjoy an awesome 10 minutes at camp. Way to go. 

( Really, give more than a dollar. $5 would be cool. $25 would be awesome. $100 and I will kiss you on the mouth, unless you're that horse.)

It was a great day. I learned that I love Camp Hanes, I am an even worse blogger than I thought, and everyone thinks the word 'anus' is funny. I'd call that a 'WIN'.