ERICA JENKS HENRY
On Writing Conferences
After pressing my face into his soft neck one last time, I place his warm, fat body down in the portable crib. Normally, I am not so aware. Only leaving makes me savor his sticky scent. I silently walk across the outdated, yarn-like carpet, and twist the handle completely before opening and re-shutting the door.
“You’re going to be late. Didn’t you say the session starts at 9:00?” my mother calls when she hears me.
“It’s fine. You know what to do when Roger wakes up from his morning nap, right?”
“Put him on the toilet. Now go.” My mother places another block on the tower she and my three-year-old, Betty, are building on a coffee table.
I check my teeth in a small, gold mirror in the foyer. No food. And eyes. No mascara on the skin. My stomach hurts. Leaving children. Being presentable and seeming intelligent to adults.
“Mommy, when will you be back?”
“Lunch time. Promise.” I embrace Madeline, who is six, one more time, lifting her off the ground, before heading out the door. I don’t say goodbye to Betty again. I don’t need to make her any sadder, though maybe it’s in my head that she’s sad at all. Forcing myself to take each action, I open the door. The feel of the cool air on my skin, and the startling blue of the sky nearly cause me to stop in my tracks. I was supposed to meet my sister and my sister’s former college roommate at the university ten minutes ago. But the creek. The way the sun glints on the sparkling surface through the gaps in the trees, trees that just received their leaves again. I want to show the kids how to dig in clay just below the grassy edges for crawfish. To wade back all the way to the river.
I drive, crunching down the gravel driveway. Though I’ve never lived here, this is my country. My ancestors, tall Nordic people encroaching west, moved to this heady frontier to have land of their own, land that’s since been parceled off and sold to people I now consider country folks, people who don’t intend to grow crops either, though, perhaps naively, I’m convinced their lives seem less directed by the endless drive which seems to propel our own.
I have come to attend a writer’s conference. I have no writing ambitions, but this conference possesses a legendary aura. In college, I unwittingly agreed to skip classes to come with a friend whose mother was a writer, only to realize en route that I was going to hear lectures from Maya Angelou, Chaim Potok, and Anne Lamotte, authors who need no explanation or introduction.
But I’m older now, and responsibilities are not as simple to shake. It is not so easy to arrive somewhere, as a child, with undivided attention, never recognizing the luxury of such pure, accidental focus. A renowned author will give her message after lunch. She’s the reason most people came: a recluse who hasn’t written a novel in a decade or so, much less spoken in public. There’s an assumed conviction she’ll say something to open our eyes, minds or souls in ways we didn’t know they were closed, an effect which will undoubtedly exhibit itself in future creative success. For this, my sister, a writer, concocted a plan for us to descend upon this Michigan city where our father was raised.
I have gone to some trouble to come: leaving my husband in Chicago, enlisting my mother to use time off to drive from Tennessee to babysit, requesting permission from my aunt to stay at her home, a home I grew up visiting but which now–years after the events recounted here–haunts me in ways that will have to wait for their own telling, and packing up three children, one who must miss school, for a road trip. And now I wish to stay, engaging in play that often bores and exhausts, instead of participating in the morning session. Is it fear? I don’t know which lecture to choose. They all seem so cerebral, arbitrary, impractical.
The spotless, cream-colored hallways of the college represent the pure, higher learning that goes on behind their doors. I am late. Stippled paper cup of scalding hot, watery coffee in hand, I slip into the only space in the classroom, half way down center aisle. People seem irritated and judgemental about my interruption, but they’re trying to contain it, because they’re nice people. Nice people: the modest, devout offspring of hardworking farmers from Northern Europe with blonde hair and pale skin and long bodies, committed to goodness, responsibility, intellectual inquiry, quiet listening, and conscientious timeliness. They offer little Calvinist smiles, for though their level of devotion may vary from one to another, their Protestant faith is part of who they are, part of what propelled their grandparents to this region.
The speaker is talking about magic. He doesn’t look in my direction though I’m the only other noise or movement in the room. The man–dark-haired, dark in general, swarthy, heavy, mid-50’s–is dramatic. He’s telling these proper men and women, many white-haired, sitting with perfect posture as they attempt careful notes on college desks, about smoking peyote with a Navajo healer in the desert. He’s feverishly describing in unrepentant, breathless detail how the idea for his latest book materialized during a wild, sweaty trip on a dusty red plateau. He credits the altered state for the entire story, which itself is something about his indigenous ancestors and a medley of mythical creatures. The audacity.
My untouched coffee forgotten on the floor to be kicked over by another class, I think, “This is why I came.” To remember the power of ideas and the surreality of imagination. I find my sister, and we grab cookies before slipping into the end of another talk, a woman describing the experience of informing a retired teacher her snowmobiling husband has been found, albeit decapitated beside a frozen pond. She is chaplain for the Maine warden service, and her stories contain broken bodies, caskets, sorrow, and acceptance. Somehow, she’s shaped crushed bones and blood-spattered, snowy landscapes into narratives with arcs, beginning and endings, and moments of epiphany.
It’s lunchtime, and my sister invites me to an exclusive brown bag writing workshop. But I want to nurse the baby, and I promised the kids I’d be home. She understands, but she doesn’t really understand that I am torn. So much I miss with every choice.
Lunch is chaos. I want to tell the kids to lower their voices, sit down properly. They don’t care that I came back. There is no celebration when I walk in the door, only yelling to be heard over one another over some slight. The baby bounces on his knees in the center of the table, napkins in crumpled piles around him. This happens whenever I leave and return. It’s always harder to be patient after I’m away. My perspective changes, and they become obnoxious. But my mother is at peace, lathering hearty bread with Miracle Whip and settling paper thin turkey and crumbly white cheddar on top. After eating, I look at my phone. Must leave in five minutes for the keynote speaker. “Should we go outside?” I ask. “I can show you how to catch crawfish.”
My mom smiles. “You’ve got time?”
“We’ll be quick.”
Outside, we take off shoes and socks and step into the pebbly sand below cool water. I settle the baby on the grass bank, setting him down to sit, then push the sleeves of my dressy denim shirt up to the elbows and crouch, not allowing the seat of my pants to touch the water. I reach under thick sod and probe the clay with my fingertips, feeling mud in my fingernails. I can’t actually remember how to find crawfish. Maybe they’ve left. Maybe it’s the wrong season. I thought it would all come back or one would just appear, but no luck. The girls have lost interest, begun to walk, hunched and careful, down the stream, away from the road, toward the river, half a mile through the thick woods. My gaze moves up. The ferns. The path through the thicket. The mossy rocks along the sides of the water. “Let’s walk over that log.”
Madeline glances back. “Really? Don’t you have to leave?”
“In a minute.” We climb out of the creek, and leaving our shoes behind, walk along the soft green ground back towards the dense wood. Madeline leads us over the thick fallen tree that’s been moved to make a path over the creek. She balances atop it. We are now in pure shadow; dappled light has been left behind.
“Me try,” says Betty, her legs so small and so chubby beneath her skirt.
Then my mother appears from the house, having come from the house. “Hey, you should go. Isn’t this the main talk you were so excited about? I can take over from here.”
“I know, I know.” I don’t hand the baby over. He’s excited watching his sisters. It’s clear he wants to get down and crawl, pulsing his legs up and down, so I place his feet onto the moss and let him press against the earth, the early stages of walking. The girls have begun to collect tiny, new spring flowers that remind me of a poem I tried to memorize in college. I think they are crocuses. Or hyacinths. I recognize lily of the valley, my birth flower that I never saw until I was an adult, only to realize it was a tiny poisonous weed. I didn’t grow up in the north, so I’m only beginning to notice and learn the real names of flora. Now the girls have truly left me behind, making their way over stones on the far side of the creek. I catch my breath watching small Betty hobble over large rocks and imagine her falling, hitting her head on her way into the creek.
Without any sort of decision, we don’t speak of the conference again. My mother stops asking. I have missed the entire keynote address. I have spent two hours under the canopy of old, thick forest with my children, revealing a sort of mystery they don’t know, remembering, nearly reliving the time I hiked to the river with my cousin who lived in this house and then skinny dipped in the dangerous, roaring water. We didn’t tell our mothers, particularly hers, who had warned against the river. And the time we got chiggers. And the treehouse we tried to build until my cousin’s older brother, the tall, handsome one, yelled at us for hammering nails into the bark of the Maple, telling us we would kill it. The anger seemed far greater than the crime.
Before the evening session, my sister returns for dinner. “How was it?” I ask, sheepish, at the blocks with Betty in place of my mother.
“Spectacular. She was amazing. The best talk I’ve heard so far, maybe ever. She just–I don’t know. You’ll have to listen to the recording. They’ll make it available after the conference. What happened?”
“I got stuck in the woods with the kids. It was too hard to leave.” It’s difficult to look in my sister’s eyes. Foolish choice. Easy way out. “It felt like we were playing in a fairy world or something. I know that’s crazy, but I got stuck.”
My sister studies me for so long that I look at her face and, finally, frown. “What is it?”
“It’s just weird. The whole talk was about how she grew up playing in the forest and imagining things. She described a ‘necessary enchantment.’”
“Really?”
“Yes. The entire lecture was about being in the woods.”
“I guess I’ll have to listen to it.” The block tower topples, old-fashioned colorful raised-letter wooden cubes tumbling off the coffee table.
Erica Jenks Henry’s work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Literary Hub, Zone 3, Maudlin House, New World Writing, and Thimble and is forthcoming in The Caribbean Writer, Oyster River Pages, and SVJ Online. With a Master’s in Public Health, she has worked with the Chicago Housing Authority and in Honduras.