PANIC
Dorothy Parker was not prone to panic. Perhaps because she always expected the worst, there was no need to get flustered when it occurred. Or maybe there was no fear that could not be squashed by a finger of scotch. For the rest of us, life can make us duck, but only for a moment.
First Twelve In The Box
Word Count 1940
The courtroom is standing room only but it has nothing to do with me or my case involving the rape of a child, which was a loser from the get-go. Late report. No physical evidence. No tearing. No bleeding. No redness. No forensics. Mother a no-show. It’s because it’s summer in Washington, D.C. and the law school interns have arrived in their pencil skirts and flats and somehow filled up the whole left side of the gallery. They were probably told they could see a “female” try a rape case in courtroom 17. A sober-looking group of shiny police officers who look like new recruits are taking up most of the first rows on the whole right side of the gallery. It looks like the rest of the seats are filled by a mixture of local cops stealing sleep in the scratchy seats and most of them reeking of this morning’s bourbon, along with their frayed and defeated witnesses, children attached to God-knows-who curled in chairs waiting for the worst to happen, homeless people seeking air conditioning, lawyers from other courtrooms looking to kill time before their cases start up again, just plain old members of the public yearning for drama, oh yeah, and other prosecutors hoping to see me go down in flames.
Caught Between The River And The Sea
Word Count 1643
In 1949, Beirut’s Jewish community was forced to leave their country. My parents ended up in New York city, some of my aunts and uncles went to Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Most went to Israel.
My husband, Val, born Vahid, is Muslim, from Iran. We met at a party in Queens in the early 1990s and fell for each other. Our marriage was not trouble-free. He agreed to have Jewish children, but he didn’t come to our second son’s bris. We divorced soon after that. Four years passed, and then one day we looked at each other. I knew then that I still loved him. He moved back in and we remarried. We don’t talk much about religion or politics. We both know it is better if we don’t.
Bugging Out
Word Count 1395
Weekday mornings between 4 and 5 am are my uninterrupted coffee hour, each precious minute like ambergris dripping viscously down the hourglass called “me time.”
On a particular Thursday in an otherwise ordinary week, my early morning grope down the darkened hallway (destination espresso) was not going per usual. In fact, the hallway seemed to contain an apparition of my mother-in-law wearing a sleeveless, flowing nightgown, staring at me like a deer in headlights.
“Good morning, Tova,” she said, in a voice that was much too chipper for the hour and frosted with barely concealed anxiety. Noooo, I thought to myself, wondering if there was any chance I could pretend that “Grandma Amo” was not standing between me and my morning coffee.
A Fitting Place
Word Count 125
Once it was the Great God Pan, whose presence felt
in woods and pastures would strike a mortal being with terror,
and awe, as the God deserved. A fitting place for panic.
These days panic shows up in the living room, or the back yard,
or the grocery store, or the short walk across grass
to where your daughter sleeps.
Luckiest Girl
Word Count 1241
I arrived at Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of a heat wave three days before Christmas, 1961. Having just finished my freshman semester at a college in frosty upstate New York, I couldn’t wait to jump into the ocean.
Walking into the crush of people filling the arrivals area, I scanned the sea of faces, wondering whether I'd recognize Lenny Auerbach from the small black and white photograph I’d looked at every day for the past three months. Lenny and I had been writing ever since my closest friend, Dickie Lieberman, told me I’d fall in love with his cousin when I went to California over my winter break. At first our correspondence had been erratic. But after a while he began calling me. I liked his deep, gravelly voice. He sounded warm and funny and I instinctively trusted him.
High Anxiety
Word Count 1595
In eighth grade, our class was scheduled to take a two-day series of tests called The Iowa Tests. I was nervous but not too nervous. I had always done well on tests, though I was prone to anxiety.
The Iowa Tests were the start of a new technology, our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Kalb, explained. Instead of marking an ‘X’ in a box or circling the right answer in a booklet that would be marked by hand, we would now have to darken ovals, or “eggs, ” on the answer sheet, called a grid, which a computer would grade. Repeatedly, she warned us to be very careful that the number next to the oval matched the number of the question in our test booklet; otherwise, all our answers would be marked wrong. I looked at the thousands of eggs on the answer sheet and felt my head spin.
Doctors Are Not Supposed To Panic
Word Count 636
Doctors are not supposed to panic.
I was certain that the boy was sick enough to be admitted, although I didn’t know what was wrong. Ben, the surgical resident, disagreed. “Just a tummy ache,” he said dismissively, and it was true, the boy hardly winced if you pressed on his stomach, and his X-ray looked so normal that we didn’t even bother waking up the radiology resident to confirm.
That was my first mistake.
Active Shooter
Word Count 1429
There are certain texts you do not want to receive from your kid in college.
Apparently armed and dangerous person on campus
I’m sheltering in place
I’m safe
The seriousness of this did not sink in immediately. I asked Toby, my son, where he was (an office inside a building where he was about to have class) and how he was feeling (like fine – sort of nervous but also sort of desensitized). I signed off, asking him to stay in touch, telling him I love him followed by three heart emojis.
Treading Water
Word Count 2240
One sweltering day during the summer between second and third grade, Mom, Dad, my big sister Oma, our Border Collie Jack, some of our fourteen cats (the ones allowed in the house), six or seven of Oma’s dolls and stuffed animals, and I were gathered on the couch near the swamp cooler. The phone rang but nobody made a move except Jack, who lifted his head towards the sound, his shaggy black bangs hanging over his dark brown eyes. After three rings, I left the only cool spot to answer. It was my new best friend, Marianne who happened to live next door. Tall, blonde, and musical she was the Hall to my Oates. With her I could ride bikes, skate, and run as fast as I wanted or play games according to actual rules: things I couldn’t do with Oma. In 1974, when Oma was almost two years old, the treatment that irradicated her brain tumor and saved her life, did extreme, irreparable damage to her brain.
“Our swimming pool is finally ready,” Marianne said.
“It’s not green and stenchy?” I asked.
The Mind Crack’d
Word Count 910
The first time your mind cracks, you bolt upright in bed. Your dorm room is always chilly, but you are sweating. You have so much energy that you are ready to climb the ugly cinder block walls. The cinder blocks, thick with paint, look as if they were glued together.
***
Cracks – veiny, spreading quickly – spider through your mind. You don’t know it yet, but you will take medication that transforms your mind into beautiful kintsugi – the Japanese art of filling cracks in pottery with gold dust. But presently, this is an attack on your sanity. It happened to Grandma. And it was iñiervos for your Abuela. Their nerves, and now yours, set hearts to pounding and make breathing irregular.
Your mother takes you to her ancient internist— the only doctor she will allow you to see. The doctor’s hands shake as he listens to your heart and inexplicably shines a light in your eyes.
The Night the Swingers Came Knocking
Word Count 838
I gave up smoking when the whole world condemned it. I thought that was a pity because the calming effect of a cigarette was good for averting panic. In hindsight I think having a cig to light up might have derailed my first bonafide panic attack as a newlywed. I married another writer, a city guy, but due to circumstances too tawdry to relate, we’d run away from the cruel world to work on our writing in an isolated, snowbound, sparsely populated environment firmly set in the middle of nowhere. The first attack came on while I was driving on an unfamiliar highway and it was getting on to dusk. I was forced to take a detour that rattled me into taking a wrong turn that left me hyperventilating and stranded on a grassy median. I won’t bore you with the details but the state trooper was very kind, patiently directed me to get out of the car and sit on the ground with my head between my knees. He stood by to direct traffic until I was ready to drive again.
Am I Dying?
Word Count 998
It was 8 o’clock when I pulled into the emergency room parking lot, the last place I wanted to be on a Friday night. My right leg was swollen and throbbing with pain. My chest tightened as I drove. I found a spot and hurried toward the entrance, the automatic double doors dinging as I limped to the front desk. Each step reverberated in my leg.
A young woman wearing a blue medical mask looked up from her phone. I cleared my throat. “Hi. My doctor told me to be seen for potential deep vein thrombosis (DVT).” What I wanted to say was I may have a blood clot in my leg after three years of fertility treatment and I’m still not pregnant.
The Long Way Home
Word Count 1338
I wanted to live in New York City from the moment I knew it existed though fate had placed me in Akron, Ohio, the –Rubber Capital of the World.
My chance to live where I really belonged came when I finished a study abroad program in London in 1969. I was twenty years old and impatient.
“Let’s move to New York,” I said to my friend, Robin.
We were at Heathrow, waiting for the plane home. Robin, a Kansas City girl, was always up for an adventure. Plus, she had a boyfriend whose father, a comedian with a declining career but name recognition, had an apartment in New York. We’d have a glamorous place to stay until we found jobs.
The Elephant Dance
Word Count 781
Joey and I traded basketball cards in my garage, the summer before fifth grade. I bullied him into swapping Pippen for Barkley, even though it wasn’t a fair trade. His head slumped in restrained protest. I never noticed the symmetry of his face before then. A blanket of black lashes cast a shadow on a decidedly handsome mole high on his right cheek.
“Anyways…Wanna watch cartoons at my house?” he asked, cutting the silence.
It was the first time we ever went to his house. I was dumbstruck by their swanky, sunken den, with its angular, black pleather sofa, navy carpet and mini blinds. Indigo tile paved a circle, like a blue eyeball.
His mom didn’t work. and shooed me away when I tried to get water from the kitchen, turning her face away. It was too late; I saw her skin etched with lines at every fold, like the hairline cracks in my driveway.
Wrong Turn
Word Count 602
After graduating from London University with a degree in Modern History, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education I went to live in Kolkata or 'Calcutta', where life seemed at times to be a succession of crises and panics. My husband, a Bengali journalist, was occasionally at odds with the party authorities over political views and policies. This sometimes involved my being taken to a local police station and questioned as a foreigner and a suspected ‘missionary’.
One summer, a German diplomat came for dinner on his way to the airport and home. After the meal, I accompanied him, as my husband was in charge of ‘putting the paper to bed.’ The driver was new and had only been working for the paper for a couple of weeks. Unbeknown to me, he decided to take a shortcut through the back alleys of the city.