Summer Reading

So far, I have had an incredibly fortunate summer with reading. All of the authors are amazing--some I've been avoiding due to their pop-culture-cult-following-ness. I'm glad I shut up about it and started in on them. I really, really encourage you to check out all of them. I'll be updating throughout the summer.

Small place, Jamaica Kincaid

Seize the Day, Saul Bellow

A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut

Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer

La cantatrice chauve, Eugène Ionesco

Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri

Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk

How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers (my hero--check out McSweeney's)

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

A Continent for the Taking, Howard French

Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders

J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, Boris Vian (an insane French writer)

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov (I've been waiting sooo long)

Back in the World, Tobias Wolff

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Hommes | Femmes, Verlaine

Bradamante, Robert Garnier--my thesis project, read for the 80th time

A Farewell to Arms, Earnest Hemingway

They're Never Kidding. No, Really.

Maybe if the security guard hadn’t teased me each morning about my Titanium-looking water bottle—maybe if I were taller, muscular, broad-shouldered—I would have responded differently. I should have learned my lesson weeks ago, on my first day of the internship. He had looked at the French scrawled across my foot and asked if I was going to the Immigration Office. I laughed and said, “Oh, yeah. I’m new,” with my Midwestern accent. He told me that it was past the elevators, to my right. I told him I was only joking and thought he had been, too; he didn’t smile and said he hadn’t been joking.

As he leaned for me after my purse slid along its rollercoaster of x-ray machines and asked if I had a knife, I looked to see if he was, perhaps this time, joking. His brow was not furrowed. His jaw was not clenched. He was not concerned.

“Oh, of course,” I replied while gathering my umbrella, book and bag.

“We have a no tolerance policy,” he insisted. “Do you always carry it?”

“Do I look like I would go anywhere without it?” I flipped my eyes from his stoic face to the wand-carrying man that had waved me through the security monitor. He stared back, not knowing how else to respond. I whispered to each of them, “Is this a joke? Are you really telling me to check my bag?”

My heart raced, lapping the embarrassment of holding up the line of eager immigrants staring toward the Immigration Office and the idea that someone looked at me and thought, “Well, why wouldn’t she carry a switchblade?” I began tossing things about: my favorite pen—They better give that back—my umbrella—Maybe the metal?—a journal, several tampons, Trident.

“Look, I really don’t have a knife. I honestly thought you were kidding,” I said. My shoulders drew closer to my neck, not defensive, but rather wanting to disappear.

“You’ll have to take it back to your car. They should have caught this days ago. Sorry for the inconvenience, Ma’am.”

“No, I really don’t carry it. I’ve never owned a knife.” Here, I got worried that I was hooked up to an invisible lie detector. Ok, I wanted to correct, not since fifth grade. I made my boyfriend’s brother buy it. I was really in love with him. It was blue. My dad threw it away. I don’t have one. Ok, my dad didn’t really throw it away, but he threatened to.

The man that is never joking took the bag from me and slid it along the rollercoaster again. “Must have been the clasp, I guess. You were really kidding?”

I threw my life back into the main compartment, hoping they caught a glimpse of the O.B. wrapper, hoping they saw Super Absorbent and were embarrassed for themselves as they scanned the next terrorist.

At the crossing--a more external nonfiction

**a much improved version of this will appear in the 2010 issue of The Broken Plate
At the crossing, your hair is blown by the train. You do not stand on the gray area closest to the rails. The voice on the loud speaker has already warned you against this. The train comes. Passes. You stand behind the red X sign. It frustrates you. It is implied that you cannot read and they have added pictures to each sign to make sure that you follow instructions. The train passes and you move to cross the tracks. A dry heat rises from them and you think of when you put pennies on the rails to flatten them on the rails behind your grandmother’s house. You stand in the heat while others cross. Your hair gives a final swirl and settles across your face, making your cheeks a mosaic. You walk to the last bus stop and sit in the metal shelter. It is not cooler because it is summer and the shelter is metal and you are surrounded by asphalt. The yellow parking lines have worn off of the asphalt. You imagine crossing the stretch like it is a desert. You would walk hunched over, even more so than you usually do. You would whisper for water and see a mirage. The plastic bag in your hand says Thank you Thank you Thank you. You have learned not to trust your eyes and do not know how many times the bag actually says Thank you. You reach inside. Your fingers close around the perfume bottle found on 16th street. It hisses when you squeeze the pump. Patchouli surrounds you. You again imagine your grandmother’s house. The smell of your uncle’s room. The feel of the carpet between your toes. You remember the rug next to you—another find, from behind the post office. With one hand on the cool glass and one hand stroking the rug’s fringe, you feel whole. You remember that it is not the having that matters. It is the touching. Your fingers feel the fringe and you know that you have hands. This makes you real. A person. The nurse standing in the line for bus 33 sees your rug. She says mm-mmm in the way that only Black mothers can. You know that this rug implies a floor, which implies a home. This makes you a Person. And you know that, for her, this is touching in another way. In the way that your mother talked about after watching Katherine Hepburn movies.

Out Loud

In five weeks, the Institute will increase a child's reading words per minute from 50 to approximately 200. The child understands, with the help of their parents and teacher, their reading level. He chooses appropriate chapter books based on a teacher's evaluation.He begins to read with fluency, "sounding like you do when you speak." He reads with his classmates, speaking loudly at his teacher. He reads one-on-one to his teacher.

Each time the words sit in front of me, my cheeks flush. My eyes do not move from the page; I am invisible. Without eye contact I will not be called on. This theory worked until middle school. Each pupil read each day. Half way through the sentence, I remembered: They're staring at me. There are 20 kids in this room watching me read about a hippo at the dentist. The words got stuck between my teeth like shredded dental floss. I spit them out, backwards with missing letters--the syntax was destroyed, meaningless.

My mother knew I was no good. She knew how the words tangled before leaving my mouth. She was familiar with the pink in my cheeks that was really no indication of just how much they were burning. In my head, I read just fine. I turned each page at a normal rate, monitoring each reach for the corner and turn against my classmates'.

As a summer project, my mother started me reading Island of the Blue Dolphins. I wasn't opposed--it was a long standing rule that every day, you read 30 minutes. I loved this rule. I took as much as a could, and would have read for hours if I wasn't afraid that I should be doing something else--helping or asking to or taking initiative. This book would be different, she told me. I would read out loud. I remember one day of the project, the special edition hard cover version of the novel, complete with water colors, was before me on the kitchen table. I spoke in broken English, trudging through a page as one does when walking through quick sand--each step careful, a pause each time you feel a misstep.

We didn't make it through the whole book. I lied about the progress I made in my room, while my mother weeded the flowerbeds. Did you read about the sailors that found her? Did she use the whale bones yet? Yes, Mom, of course. I finished it today.

When Joe explained his teaching position for the summer, my memory flipped through the illustrations in Island of the Blue Dolphins. I thought of how each picture helped me lie, helped me avoid the tightened chest and flaming cheeks from speaking. I defended the children that only progressed to 96 wpm. Did we all have to read fluently in front of a crowd? Does this truly show their ability to understand all that they read? I wanted to hug the Low-Level Kids, the 0's and 0+'s that "aren't successful" with the passage read with their teacher.

summer, vacation

First morning in St. Louis. I woke up to Baby chewing her cage. She's adjusting well to her knew home. While I cleaned the kitchen, she sniffed the wind sneaking through the window. While I swept, she stretched out her legs, reclining like a Greek ruler.

Joe spent the morning with his work-training binder. I let Baby out on the floor. She dodged table legs and electrical cords, hopping onto Joe's papers. I left them together--"bonding," as Joe keeps telling me. He had accepted Jill, the guinea pig. He knew that she made me happy. He's enjoying Baby and her anxious tries to gain our attention.

Adding her to the (now clean) apartment makes St. Louis feel like home. Today, we are a couple belonging in a city, making our lives. Today, we will move the furniture in the living room and spend the evening grocery shopping. I will learn how to ride the bus. We will feel domestic, comfortable in a truly happy way--a contentment that doesn't feel like I am resigning myself to anything.

I catch myself filling in what people think when they see us together: a modern couple, a natural pair. I smile behind my sunglasses and new bangs. Then I pause and think, "Am I trying to hard? Am I trying?" I stop thinking about what other people are thinking. I slip back into my thoughts:

It is summer. I know this because the water in the shower is cool, and the sun makes the curtain and sink extra white.

I want peanut butter. I haven't had any in my house for over a week, and Joe has chunky, all-natural Trader Joe's just hanging out in the fridge.

Today, I will finish my social networking research report. I hope Laura at Earth Shares thinks my initiative-taking warrants me doing the writing aspects of the internship this summer, instead of the file thinning we talked about.

War and Peace is rather long. I want to read it this summer, but I don't want to get burnt out. Maybe I'll read one huge book every summer. Yeah, that sounds good. Next summer, The Fountainhead.

Lunch.

Schwinn

On my most recent drive home, I passed Larry's Bikes on a side street in St. Marys, Ohio. The proprietor, a retired man in a vinyl lawn chair next to a watering can, took a moment to recognize that I was a customer. This was easy to understand. Larry's Bikes is located in Larry's Front Yard. I had parked on the side of the road in a residential part of town. He was surprised when I began talking to him and not the younger neighbors.

Me: I'm looking for a road bike. I saw the teal Schwinn.

Man: That's not a road bike. The tires are 23 inches.

Me: I'll take it.

It is skinny and light weight. The gears change automatically, leading me to think that it's fixed. I didn't really understand what this term meant. I may not deserve this bike. Googling it, I found out that the Sprint is a lesser version of Varsity and/or Continental, the snobbiest of Schwinns. It was made in '75, before Taiwan really entered the picture. My faith in the bike increased.

The light weight threw me a bit the first time I pulled myself onto the skinny tires. I felt wobbly and vulnerable. I suggested a ride with Sam, one of my good friends. She too had just gotten a new bike, and we wanted to get comfortable on them, to look natural when we dodged cars and potholes.

The ride was my first time on Cardinal Greenway. We snaked through allies and a semi-circle of benches. We stumbled upon the Depot, a renovated train-station-turn-museum. We passed under a bridge. Three men were also under this bridge. In my memory, I see the orange glow of cigarettes, but I am sure that they are not cigarettes. This may not have happened. My mind fills in details that I wish were there. I felt confident on my bike. This hadn't happened for a while; I'd been paranoid since the car break-in.

The moral of this story is that the Greenway equals perfect nature/man-made nature picture opportunities. I am now online ordering a Holga. My roommate has one of them--a cheap, plastic, fixed-focus camera that gives you square, nostalgic pictures. The goal is that we will go riding and stop every few minutes to snap pictures through primary color lenses. It will also serve as the perfect way to document my stay in St. Louis: the whiteness of the apartment, the comfortable feel of the city's center, the coffee rings on the table.