Lost
Dorothy Parker knew what it meant to lose things–her looks, her loves, some jobs. Sometimes, we have to lose our grip to find the truth. This month, our writers take us on astonishing journeys of being lost and found.
Samos, Samos
Word Count 1271
On a hot, dusty Sunday, my mother, little sister Sophie, and I are on a bus heading to the far side of the Greek Island, Samos. An island that, at this moment in time, is struggling with the horror of drowned migrants fleeing drought, war, and famine washing up on its shores.
But in 1977, we were just trying to get to the other side, and all we knew of trouble was the Greeks and the Turks hated each other, and should war break out, Samos, the island closest to Turkey, would be ground zero. Being seventeen, I didn’t care. I was just happy that the place was full of soldiers who took me out on dates and allowed me time away from my mother, who had chosen that trip to start going through menopause, yet another natural occurrence in her body that she was completely ill-prepared for. Pregnancy and digestion are two others that immediately spring to mind.
I don’t know why we needed to get to the other side of the Island, there were no ruins or secret beaches.
Speechless
Word Count 1769
I’d been in crippling, ever-worsening pain for a couple of years when it became clear that if I didn’t want to end up immobile, I’d need hip replacement surgery. I knew a few people who’d had the procedure, and they’d deemed it life-changing. I chose mobility. The operation, performed at the #1 orthopedics hospital in the country, went swimmingly. No complications or infections, and I was up and walking immediately. Of course, there was some pain and unsteadiness, but I was prepared for that. What I didn’t expect was waking up a few days later, suddenly unable to speak.
I wasn’t totally mute. I could push the air out, but the words that followed were so raspy, and at such a low volume it was nearly impossible for me to discern them, let alone anyone else.
The Art of Losing
Word Count 821
My older sister was leaving home for college. We were driving her to Yellow Springs, Ohio, from Memphis in my mother’s Oldsmobile, the car favored by villains in made-for-television movies. Our family has been falling apart forever, but it has taken us, the children, a while to figure it out, and now my parent’s divorce is making the fault lines painfully obvious.
My sister has packed the things she wants to take with her. Clothes, bedding, the stereo she and I share. It’s low quality, with a penny taped to the needle to keep it from skipping, but I have listened to Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and Hair on that stereo over and over. I can still sing all the songs by heart (though I should not; my voice is awful).
We were poor, but not poor poor. We lived in a big house. Our parents went to college. My dad worked in advertising; my mother was a teacher, but the divorce put a strain on our finances.
Spell B-I-D-E-N Backwards
Word Count 1078
As usual on an early Friday morning, I crossed Amsterdam Avenue, Broadway, and West End, to my yoga teacher’s basement studio. I walked in and leaned mutely against a wall. The teacher and four other students stared at me in puzzlement. Someone must have asked if I was all right. Maybe I answered. My old friend and yoga mate Emmy took me in a cab to my doctor’s office. Emmy told me all of this later. I remember nothing.
My doctor found that my vital signs were normal and then said I had to see a neurologist. I had a couple of hours to wait, and I wanted to go home first. Emmy said she’d come with me; I said no, I’m okay. Emmy said I wasn’t okay. I have no memory of any of this.
Dear friend that she is, Emmy took my arm and guided me home, where I have a dim memory of standing over my sofa and discovering it to be cold and clammy-wet. I asked Emmy if I had peed on it. She told me she thought it was a coffee spill.
I’d made coffee? When? And spilled it? Really?
He Was Just Here
Word Count 1207
David and I danced at a jazz club, then walked a mile uphill across campus toward my home. The clock hands in the bell tower had long swept past midnight as we trailed through the snow covering Cornell’s main quad. We talked about dreams we’d had the night before.
“I was flying,” he told me, “like a bird over the valley.” There was hope in that image. The future stretched before us like the night’s star-speckled sky. We stopped at a stone bench with a view of the lake to the north. Gusts of wind whipped around as we read words carved in the granite.“To those who shall sit here rejoicing, To those who shall sit here mourning, Sympathy and greeting, So have we done in our time.”
As David leaned into me, my blood surged like the water that rushed in the gorge below.
Days later, we met for lunch on the south side of campus. Our conversation felt stilted, which was a surprise, given the intimacy we had started to share.
Gone Girl
Word Count 1586
Snow was falling thick and fast on Manchester, N.H., when 14-year-old Pamela Mason made dinner for herself and her younger brother, then left for a babysitting job. The man waiting in his car had answered her notice in a laundromat. It was January 13, 1964.
Pamela never came home. When news broke of her disappearance, a collective shiver went through my high school in Durham, 34 miles away. She was Pam to us--a classmate of mine until her family's recent move to Manchester. All of us girls had been warned not to get into cars with strange men. We'd heard the stories of abductions and grisly discoveries, been chilled by the occasional headline about a girl who met a bad end.
Those headline girls only looked familiar—the tentative smile, the flip carefully brushed for photo day at school. They didn’t know our gossip or shower in the same locker room, bodies angled to hide the curve of breasts. When Pam appeared above the fold, I recognized her lustrous hair. I wanted to feel only sympathy and fear for her, but guilt knotted itself around my heart and squeezed.
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Word Count 1767
A scruffy green angel is floating under ceiling lights, looking upside down at me. Things are beeping. Beeping means someone’s alive. I am strapped on a board, looking up at the world. The scruffy angel asks me a question. I point to my head.
My brain broke up with me. Rather, my brain broke up in me and sometimes it shows on my face. I pray that it won’t, but I know that it does. It happens when I have to be somewhere I can’t find or do something I can’t do or say something I can’t say. There are no words. This is called aphasia.
I spent decades telling folks how to prevent everything bad, protect everything important, and procure everything good. All they wanted or needed to know, have, want, wear, buy, try, lose, use, taste, sip, skip, slip into or out of. That was called freelance writing. My clients were the corporations that owned the brands known as Oprah and Elmo and Martha Stewart, and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog.
Still tethered to the board, I just keep looking up. The angel comes back.
Dog Gone
Word Count 692
The day after my husband left, the dog dug out. She was known for her escapes. I’d tried to keep watch from the back kitchen window. One eye on the baby, one eye on the toddler, one eye on the dog. There wasn’t enough of me to keep us all safe at home.
It was unseasonably warm, ground thawed with daffodils poking from the earth. The type of spring day that could give you hope. Or make you manic.
“If you love me, you’ll let me get a dog,” my husband said years before. I didn’t want a dog. I wanted a baby. But each month, my period kept arriving. So, I nodded my head, and said “yes” to the dog.
At first, she was so easy to hold. She fit in the palm of my hand. Months passed. The dog grew. She ate shoes, books, a pair of my underwear. Eventually, her appetites turned to the outdoors. She found all the weaknesses in our back fence.
Years later, we had a baby. Now another. And the dog? We could hardly contain her. We patched holes, dug wire into the soil. We bought expensive accessories I found buried under shrubbery.
Blinded by Guilt
Word Count 1994
When I was a senior in college, I thought I was going blind.
One day in January, my vision started to darken—it seemed a scrim made of tiny particles hung between me and the rest of the world—and so I traversed our windswept quad in upstate New York and signed in with jittery handwriting at the health center. I thought I knew why I was losing my vision: a month earlier, I had smoked some pot that pushed me through a thicket of hallucinations so terrifying I was afraid I’d done some permanent damage to my brain. When I got scared, I could be wildly irrational; two years earlier, after lying down with a boy I liked, just hugging and talking, I feared I was pregnant.
I felt scared about the pot incident because of how my father reacted when my brothers started partying as teenagers. He yelled. He punched a hole in the wall. He wandered the house weeping.
Où est Pookie?
Word Count 1895
One day on our morning walk in the forest, we went to a new place, 'las naos peyrous' or the nine stones. It's a prehistoric landmark like Stonehenge, with the stones arranged in a small circle. The stones are about hip height. One of our dogs, we had six last year, Pookie, is wilful, and despite her age, when we least expect it and even when we do and think we can catch her, decides to head off, taking the others with her. She took off that Saturday morning. The others eventually came back, but she didn't.
Pookie was named after a flying rabbit. She looked just like him with her angelic white face and wonky ears. I had recovered my Pookie books when all my belongings were shipped to France, where I'd finally bought my first house. These books – there are only three – are the fertile hot beds from which my life grew. Ivy L. Wallace's illustrations for Pookie entered my unformed brain and took it over.
Can’t Get Stoned Again
Word Count 1042
As we neared the entrance to Olympic National Park, my husband turned into the parking lot of a marijuana dispensary. The legal marijuana business was still in its infancy back home in New York City, so we were amused to see the proliferation of dispensaries on our road trip through the Pacific Northwest.
“Yes?” Steve asked, glancing at me as he pulled into a spot.
During the counterculture years, I’d whiled away many an evening high on weed and my youth. Friends gathered in someone’s tenement apartment, passing around a joint. The Velvet Underground or John Coltrane on the stereo. Conversations that were either deeply profound or impossibly funny.
Lost In LA
Word Count 1276
I’d written a screenplay about my young life, and, shock of shocks, someone in the film business expressed interest. It took me six months to write the script, and I had no clue what I was doing but didn’t think that was a deterrent as it was LA, and we had a sweet rental in Venice Beach, and just about every person I met was either an actor or a screenwriter or an A.D. or a film editor or working in development. Every conversation was about getting meetings and creating buzz or who struck gold landing a sweet studio job or on a TV series. These conversations put ideas in my head that I could write and sell a script, too, just like every other person.
I felt I had an advantage due to the fact my husband was already working in the film business. He was a screenwriter, and a few of his scripts were produced and made into B-movies that turned out to be early vehicles for future big-name stars like Kristen Davis and Julia Roberts, as well as end-of-the-road jobs for semi-has-beens like Oliver Reed and Eartha Kitt.
Yesterday? Today?
Word Count 749
I don’t remember ever being lost, but my memory is full of holes, and it might have slipped through. A couple of years ago, I went so far as to imagine hopping in the car and getting lost on purpose to see what it felt like. That’s an odd thought for a woman in her eighties. Maybe I’d been lost as a child and found my own way home and wanted to relive the triumph. You’d think something like that would stick. Because why remember what I do remember? A million tiny details of no consequence. Eating blue popsicles in New Orleans; the street where we lived was paved with shells; our pear tree hung over a bend in the road, dropped its fruit into a blizzard of yellowjackets; the first time I ever babysat, the mother had made her young children a cheese souffle.
The other day someone asked me what kind of child I’d been. I have no idea.
Lost in the Mall
Word Count 1664
I perched on the edge of the family room couch where I had been told to stay, waiting to see what strange outfit my ten-year-old daughter would surprise me with next. I had explained to her that we were going all out for my husband’s parent’s wedding anniversary, renting a limo, eating in a fancy French restaurant, and posing for family photographs. I offered to take Lee shopping, but she said she had a better idea.
“I’ll pick out something from my closet. I’ll give you choices. It’ll be fun!”
I looked down at outfit number four dumped at my feet– a floral T-shirt paired with camouflage green leggings and sandals with plastic daisies. “Too beachy,” I’d said.
“Close your eyes,” she said from down the hallway. “Ta Da!”
My eyes flew open, and I took in Lee’s newest version of dressy. She’d matched a brown blouse covered in green and yellow daisies with a jet-black skirt with magenta roses. Wide pink chandelier earrings floated above a large shark tooth necklace around her small neck. Her freckled face was framed by an auburn bob, combed neatly for once, but her makeup took my breath away. Pouty lips, glistening with the “Wow! Violet” lipstick she had taken from my makeup drawer.
Lost in Hardy Country
Word Count 938
We flew to London on Friday, May 13th. I liked traveling on days most people considered unlucky. The planes were always half empty.
I’d always dreamt of visiting Wessex, Thomas Hardy’s name for a group of English counties in Dorset where his novels take place. Having read them all, I often wondered whether the locations Hardy wrote about were as beautiful as his descriptions suggested.
We had a reservation at a hotel in Dorset called The Summer Lodge, a romantic country house located in Evershot, a tiny village with a population of 150. As we rode down a steep hill next to a church and onto the winding cobblestone main street, I noticed a little thatch roof house on the left with a sign that read “Tess Cottage.” This turned out to be the actual home in which the heroine of my favorite Hardy book, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ate breakfast in a “cottage by the church.”
My husband quickly became comfortable driving on the “wrong side of the road,” and we spent our days meandering through charming hamlets in the rolling countryside and stopping in lovely little tea rooms along the English Channel. It was all just as Hardy described.