One weekly MFA student ritual–you know, besides, hopefully attending class–is the reading series at a local bar, in which MFA students, past and present, read their work. Beer, pizza, good stories, gossip between stories. It’s a good time.
I don’t, however, like reading out loud. The first few weeks of the fall semester are devoted to first year student readings, and last fall, I blundered through something. I didn’t want to repeat the experience this coming year, but it’s difficult to avoid reading if one is friends and co-workers with the grad students who run the series. I wrote something, spent the 48 hours before the reading bellyaching (you can verify this with multiple sources), dashed to the series straight from my Tuesday night class, drank beer, and read my thing. Who knew I could be intentionally funny?
Here’s part of what I read, which was itself a fish out of water experience that’s keeping with the spirit of the blog. I’m not going to fool you or myself and claim that this is my best piece of writing, but I think people are more forgiving on a piece when they hear it rather than read it, even if they are MFA students training to dissect work. For those of you who knew me in high school, or have visited my family’s house since senior year of high school, these incidents may sound familiar.
A poem of mine won a scholarship contest for New York City high school students sponsored by a media corporation. I stopped by the company’s Times Square office, answered a few questions about my high school activities and college plans, and sat for a photographer who snapped at least fifty shots before he was satisfied.
The night of the awards ceremony, my mother, Greg and I took the subway into Manhattan. As we approached the playhouse where the ceremony was taking place, I spied large posters propped up on easels through the tinted windows. When we stepped inside, I saw that the posters were actually blown-up photographs of the first place winners in each contest category. And there was my picture, one of the very last shots the photographer had taken of me. It was at least four feet tall.
Greg laughed as I gaped at my picture, clapping me on the back.
I had to wait behind the stage curtain as some author published by the media group blathered on about how I was an editor of my high school paper and a dedicated member of the environmental club, before a stagehand parted the red fabric to let me step out to applause. I grimaced in the lights shining down on me, shook some hands, and took my trophy. The clapping died down—all except one person in the audience.
“That’s one enthusiastic mother out there,” the event’s emcee said into the mic, when the lone person stopped clapping. The audience chuckled.
When the ceremony ended, I weeded my mom and brother out of the crowd. Greg started clapping when he spotted me.
“There was that one person who was still clapping after everyone else,” I remembered.
“Yeah, that was me,” he answered. “Hehe.”
My photograph was still propped on an easel in the lobby, and my mother wandered over to it. She asked one of the event coordinators if we could take it, and the woman said to go ahead. My mother looked to Greg, and nodded. The four of us—the photograph carried by Greg—made our way out of the playhouse and down Lexington Avenue into the subway station. The 6 train was just pulling away as we got through the turnstiles.
Greg lifted the photo above his head, my giant grinning mug turned towards the passengers on the departing train. He waved the picture from side to side.
“Do you know who this is? Do you know who this is?” he shouted.
“Can you please—” I said, putting my hands at both sides of my face like blinders.
We got on the next train that pulled into the station. Greg sat down with the picture in front of him, resting it on the tops of his shoes. The front of the photo faced the people who sat across from us. One of them, a little girl, glanced at the picture, looked at me, and then at the picture again.
“Can you please turn the picture around?” I hissed into Greg’s ear when we made our subway transfer.
“Why?” he asked, but when we hopped on the Queens bound 7 train, he sat with my image facing him.
On the last leg of our odyssey, a bus home from Flushing Main Street, Greg and I waited behind my mom as her arthritic knees struggled to climb up the steps of the bus. I had my back to Greg, and wasn’t paying attention to how he was holding my picture.
“Ohhh, she’s nice,” a voice said.
I spun and saw that the elderly woman standing behind Greg was looking at the picture. It was practically as tall as she was. My brother had turned to face her.
“That’s my sister,” he said.
I whirled back around, my face hot, and boarded the bus.
As we walked the few blocks home from the bus stop, I strode several feet ahead of my mother, while Greg matched his step with hers. My mother spoke.
“I was just thinking about something, from when you had just been born. Your cousin William was over playing with Greg, and he was interviewing Greg with a tape recorder. You’re in your crib crying, and the two of them come see. William asks your brother, ‘Who’s that?’ and your brother says ‘That’s my sister’—just like he did with the woman at the bus stop back there.”
Greg grumbled in response to the story. It was only then that I realized this was the grouchiest he had been that night, on a night that had been all me. Once in the house, he set down the photo in front of the living room fireplace, which it completely covered—and where the picture still sits, to this day. He stood in front of it, and I came up from behind him, plunking the trophy, which had been my burden on the trip home, on the mantle. My brother looked at the picture, then at me. He clapped me on the back and nodded.
Girl Out of Bubble 