anti:freeze

I am deep into the silent, speculative part of my process. That time between rough notes and feverish freewrites. That time when I stare out the windows for half an hour or more, pace the hallways, whisper questions to myself on my way to the mailbox. That time when writing is no longer literal, a simple act. Writing is a state of being that takes me over. It is physical, tactual, hallucinatory. Everything is called into question.

Intimacy and surveillance. These are the questions that gnaw at my days, chewing the silence and spitting it back at my heels.

What kind of a person sees dumpster and thinks vagina? And does anyone else wish the sticker said warning instead of caution? Not so subtle a difference as you might think.

Ronald Reagan was elected when I was five years old. He was president until I was thirteen - my entire elementary and middle-school career. Almost my entire childhood.

My father was a union activist and dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, with a stockpile of election signs and a maniacal hatred of trickle-down economics. Our car bumpers, tee shirts, garage walls, and front yard were all fair game for political slogans. The Course is a Curse - Vote Democrat. Mondale-Ferraro. Apple for Congress. Weekends: Brought to You by Organized Labor. Eat Your Import. I.B.E.W. Local 405.

In my household, politics were personal. Every dinner for eight years, my father ranted and raged about Reaganomics. Union busting. Iran-Contra. Star Wars.

Maybe because of this, I associate Ronald Reagan with childhood. When I heard news of his death, my eyes immediately welled up. Not because he was gone, but because an entire era was suddenly - unexpectedly - resurrected. The Challenger explosion. Union pickets. Riding my bicycle up and down the street, popping wheelies on potholes. Walter Mondale campaign rallies. My favorite terrycloth roller-skate shirt. The Evil Empire. Nightmares about mushroom clouds. My father laid off again and again. A dead body on the street in front of our house. AIDS. The Cold War. My sister dancing to Madonna 45s on our blacktop driveway. Apartheid. Iran-Contra. Just Say No.

I share Reagan's birthday (February 6th) and his provenance (the midwest). We both had alcoholic fathers. We both fled west. The similarities end there. Politically, I am more left than even my father. More left than the Democrats (not difficult).

This morning, I woke with a strange sense of sadness - a sense that history had finally caught up to the present, its mouth open wide, ready as Saturn to devour its own children.

Paris, March 1993

When I was seventeen, I graduated early from highschool. My boyfriend at the time was much older, and he surprised me with a plane ticket to Paris - careful to choose a departure date just weeks after my eighteenth birthday, so my parents could not stop me at the airport.

The trip was a disaster.

Within hours of checking into our hotel, he tucked all our cash into his jean pockets and abandoned me with no food, no francs, and a terrifyingly limited vocabulary. He was off to find his first love, a Parisian woman with long, brown hair and porcelain skin. The woman whose photograph decorated his home back in Iowa.

He came back occasionally, but it was clear this was not our trip.

My most vivid memory is the morning he brought fresh custard to our hotel. I had not eaten in several days, and I was in danger of passing out from low blood sugar. The sweet cream dissolved on my tongue and slid down my thirsty throat like melted ice. My second course was one ripe clementine. Sugar and acid. Nothing ever tasted so good.

Strange that this photo is one of the few that turned out - and one of only three that survived all these years. My Pentax K1000 was broken, and most of my pictures were black. Empty.

In this image, the Eiffel Tower seems misty and romantic, the kind of Paris I never had.

Dead people see everything you do. This is what my aunt told me when Grandpa died. She leaned in close and pressed her rouged cheek against my earlobe, so close I could smell orange Certs on her breath as she whispered, so close she left a fine dust of blush on my ear. Certs smelled like the inside of my mother痴 purse, the zippered compartment for car keys and lipstick, in which she sometimes hid baggies filled with Cheerios to hand out during church sermons or long days at the hospital. We spent a lot of time in hospitals.

Grandpa is watching from above, my aunt said. If you pick your nose, he will know. If you kiss a boy, he will know. From now on, I would never be alone.

That night, when I stripped off my polyester roller skate shirt and slid into the bathtub, I felt dirty grit against my buttocks and calves, soap slime like grease between my toes. Grandpa was watching me bathe. I was not sure where to locate him � inside the lightbulb or mirror, floating on a cloud, dispersed in the air all around? I leaned over to hide my crotch and chest and wondered how I could dry off without the old man peeking.

Later, when I asked my aunt about privacy - how to feel alone when there were ghosts all around - she said not to worry. It only matters if you do something wrong.

I asked if dead people could hear us, too, but she did not know. How could they ever understand without our words? How could images be enough?

*napkin notes: notes scribbled on napkins or paper towels, usually fast and feverish

Sorry for the slow posting this week. I am packing for a move, meeting a publishing deadline, working on the magazine, and some other things I will not mention here. Posting will return to its normal pace in a few weeks. For now, new writing will be posted every several days. -K

Monday morning at the coffee shop. A toddler with a pageboy haircut and marzapan stuck to her cheek snatches a sugar cookie from the day-old bakery basket and lifts it above her head. The cookie is decorated like a fairy tale cottage, with periwinkle paint and chocolate shutters, and for a moment, it almost seems like the house is the prize - like the little girl is living some fantasy from her favorite book. But then she screams yummy, and I know she is after the sugar fix, the creamy frosting that melts on contact with the tongue, the cookie so sweet you can grind the processed sugar crystals on your teeth. Mom, she whines.

Her mother takes one look at the cookie and shakes her head. Put it back. She stands, gathers napkins and cups from their table, and zips up her purse.

The little girl looks over her shoulder at the cash register, folds up the hem of her dress, and wraps the cookie inside. And here is the thing. She does not think twice about shoplifting. She wants the cookie, she has no money, and her mother refuses to buy it. When she glances at the cash register, she hardly seems frightened or ashamed. Instead, her eyes harden with determination - empowerment, even. She has made her own decision, and no one can stop her. In that moment, she leaps past the boundaries society has drawn for her - economic, social, and legal. She will not be the innocent child. She will not allow others to tell her what to eat, or when. She will not participate in capitalism.

I am actually kind of rooting for her, silently applauding her crime from my table, when her mother catches on to the plan. She yanks down the dress hem, and the cookie falls out, breaking into chunks on the floor. The frosting is dented and smeared, the wrapper open, the cookie dirty. The mother glances at the register and picks every crumb from the floor, cramming them back inside the wrapper. She lifts several cookies from the day-old basket and hides the broken one underneath.

Ready to go?

Her daughter nods. They hold hands as they walk out the door, co-collaborators covering for each other's crimes.

cover illustration for The Snowy Day

Have you ever read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats? Whenever someone asks how I discovered writing, I remember the little boy in the bright red snowsuit.

And I remember the word breakfast appeared in the text. I was reading to myself, curled up in my father's recliner, when I got stuck on this word. It looked ugly below the brilliant illustrations. And worse, it made no sense. How could breakfast evoke cereal, orange juice, pancakes, and maple syrup? How could those syllables ever taste as sweet as the first morsel of food every morning?

I whispered the word over and over. Breakfast breakfast breakfast. And suddenly, I realized that breakfast was made up of two separate words - that I could break the word down into its components. Break. Fast. Break. Fast.

Breakfast! I shouted to my mom. You break the fast! It makes sense! This was some time before kindergarten, though I don't remember the year. (I do remember hoping we would read books like this at school.)

I immediately ransacked my father's magazine stand, searching for more words to break down. Words contained hidden messages. Words could be cut, collaged, transformed. Words were bubbling over with possibility.

Looking back, there was something else in The Snowy Day that inspired me. In the story, a young boy wakes up to a snow-covered, urban wonderland. He leaves blue footprints in the snow. He uses a stick to shake flakes from the tree branches. And best of all, he is a child psychogeographer, actively transforming the city with his imagination.

I have finally returned to evidentiary:alchemy, after a month-long hiatus due to migraines, packing for the move, and writing like crazy to meet a magazine deadline. Tomorrow, the telephone and ISP switch off for one (or more) days while we transfer accounts to our new address, so posting may be delayed. When next I post, it will be from inside our new digs. Yay!