Raw Edges: A Memoir

Parting the Waters

: : 251 : : My attic, my room at the top, my writer’s garret—I sat at my desk on another sweltering morning in the month of August 2002. The heat was already a blanket smothering anything I might want to put on paper as well as my desire to write it. It’s hogwash to scratch ink or type words on paper and think it matters. I slammed my journal shut and ignored Mr. Peeps, my new canary, who was blissfully singing at the top of his range. I hate writing. It’s only secondhand living. Leftovers. Observation. I’m a scribe, an amanuensis to be exact. Nothing more. Even Joseph Smith said, “O Lord, deliver us in due time from the little, narrow prison, almost as it were, total darkness of paper, pen, and ink—and a crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect language.” And everyone thinks a writer’s life is so exotic . . . And yet, last night I was reading someone else’s words: Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff. While wandering through primitive villages in Armenia, he came across a boy trapped inside a circle drawn in the dust. The boy gyrated as if possessed and jumped frantically up and down, but wouldn’t leave the confines of the circle. He wouldn’t consider crossing the line. He fell to his knees and sobbed while other children watched from a distance and laughed. Finally, Gurdjieff, observing this odd situation , approached the boy. Using his shoe, he rubbed a portion of the line from the dust. When the circle was broken, the boy ran away, ecstatic. :: Parting the Waters :: 252 : : r a w e d g e s When I closed the book and turned out the lamp, my last thought was that maybe I, too, was the boy in the circle, crying because I couldn’t get out when I could be smudging out the lines drawn around me with my own foot. It should be easy to extend one foot and erase part of the circle, erase the perimeters of my personal story. Didn’t God give me two feet, not just one? But the thought got lost during the tossing and turning and the mummification of myself in the sheets during the overheated night. Now it was the overheated tent-top of a house that morning that felt so claustrophobic . The dormer window needed washing. The venetian blinds had dust thick on the slats. When I walked to the refrigerator to find two eggs for scrambling, no oatmeal today—too hot to think of boiling water— I bumped my head on the ceiling. I slammed the door hard in response, forgetting about eggs. It’s time to end it, Phyllis. This is ridiculous. Just face it. Nobody needs you anymore. Maybe they never did. And who in the hell wants to read your writing anyway? It’s too depressing and self-absorbed. People want to laugh, have a good time. Stop kidding yourself that you’re writing a book anyone will want to read. I heard footsteps. I waited to see who was here so early in the morning. It was my son, Chris, barely winded after climbing three flights of steep stairs to the attic. “Chris,” I said, tying the belt tighter on my bathrobe, trying to lighten the thickness in my voice. “Fancy seeing you.” “Hi, Mom,” he said in a chipper voice. “I thought I’d drop by to see if you want to go for a bike ride.” Then he stopped, as though he could feel the sensations riding the air of this room—my anger at my lot in life Parting the Waters : : 253 turning inward and raging at me in the form of despair, the presence of a roundhouse demon sitting on top of me and squashing me flat. “Hey, Mom. What’s wrong?” I can’t pretend. I don’t have it in me today. I pulled open the refrigerator door, bent to stare at the carton of eggs, and wondered why I hadn’t taken any out for scrambling when I was in there the first time. When I stood up, I bumped my head on the sloping ceiling. Again. “This slanted roof is driving me nuts. I can only stand up straight in the center of the room and have to bend over everywhere else I walk. I can’t take this narrow room...