Anecdotes

Contents

The Boy Is Dead

The Boy Is Dead

Human Microphone

Dark Thoughts

The Job Interview: A Murder

Let’s Play Oil Slick

It’s Anticipation That’s Keeping Me Alive

Cookies

Walking

When A Tree Develops Problems

You Know What’s Great?

Whitecaps

The Vision

Two Friends On A Beach

Birds

The Day the World Ended

We’re Not Here to Talk about Aliens

Flowers

Trading Cards

Bike and the Fire Hydrant

We’re not Here to Talk About Aliens

The Pad

Stickers

Barbie Dolls

Freight

Burning Schoolhouse

My Body

Public Pool

A Period Story

Desire

The People Skirt

Popularity

I’m Taking Care of It

Barn Bash

SKIPPING

Sit Down Beside Megan

Jackie Gleason

The Fight

Meaning of the Universe

Born Again

Fuck Truck

Yellow Sticky Notes

Hard to Get

I Won’t Clean the Tub

The Lung Specialist

Psychics

Contest

Wipeout

This Isn’t a Conversation

My Dream House

My Dream House

The Bed

A Laugh

How Can You Go On?

Date Night

I Shit Here

Lima Beans

The House Fire

The Viaduct

The Attic

The Present

Do I Have To Be Me?

Remote Control

Bedroom Community

The Bus Stop

The Order

Tug-of-War

Children

The Sunburn

At the Bar

You Don’t Exist

Tumble in the Hay

The Swap

Sunset

Better

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

Colophon

The Boy Is Dead

The Boy Is Dead

The boy is dead, and we will spend the rest of the story trying to find out why and what happened and how it affected the people in the boy’s life.

The boy came from a white middle-class family (his mother Protestant, his father Catholic) who were indifferent to him because he had a facial disfigurement from birth. As soon as he came into the world, he was not what they had anticipated. So they treated him more like a pet to keep fed and watered, which they did adequately.

While he is somewhat missed, his parents were able to get on with their lives fairly quickly after his death because they simply had not paid all that much attention to him when he was alive.

His parents had the boy because they thought it would strengthen their relationship, even though neither of them really had an interest in children. The boy had no siblings. His Catholic grandparents lived on the other side of the country and never got to know their grandchild. The boy’s mother told him his grandparents took no interest in him because she refused to baptize him Catholic. His mother claimed she wanted the boy to make up his own idea about religion when he got older, but the boy knew the truth—she was ashamed to bring her disfigured child into the church.

Nonetheless, his Catholic grandparents sent him Christmas cards and modest birthday gifts. Once the boy’s father took him to see his grandparents, but his father was really interested in visiting an ex-girlfriend, during a time that came to be known in the family as his mid-life crisis. The boy watched TV for the entire trip, and his grandmother cooked him frozen supermarket lasagna every night. Even her store-bought cookies tasted bad.

The boy felt unloved—although he never told anyone how he felt. Not even the school counsellor who was later arrested for sleeping with his students. In elementary school, during recess, the boy often hid in the bathroom so he wouldn’t have to face being alone in the yard with all the other kids who had managed to form friends. The boy had often wondered how people formed friendships since he was pretty sure he didn’t like a single person in his life and couldn’t imagine voluntarily spending time with anyone. No, he did not play video games. No, he did not read. No, he was not creative and would never be great or one day appreciated. He was just a bored person who was terribly alone. He didn’t like TV either but watched it because it gave him a good excuse to fix his eyes on something other than the ceiling.

His parents had threatened him with a psychologist, but he knew they would be too preoccupied with themselves and their own problems—their affairs, their jobs that they hated, their worries about money—to do anything about it. When his mother said psychologist, the boy would nod and put his arm over his eyes. They wouldn’t take him to an appointment, and even if they set one up, he wouldn’t go.

The boy’s father hated fat people. Every night at the dinner table, he would talk about the woman he worked with. He called her fat and a loudmouth and a busybody. The boy thought his father didn’t like the woman because she reminded the boy’s father of his mother (the boy’s grandmother).

When the police found the boy’s body in the river—bloated and decomposed, almost unrecognizable, the boy’s parents hadn’t even known he was missing and couldn’t remember the name of his dentist. Oh sure, his mother cried when she realized she wouldn’t be someone’s mother anymore, but she wasn’t affected in a really significant way. She had liked the idea of being someone’s mother—just not this boy’s mother. She felt a sort of relief upon hearing about his death, like when you are fired from a job you hate but still need the money. There’s that twinge of regret and wondering if you did everything you could to keep the job, but then the next morning you wake and realize this was the best thing that could have ever happened to you. The boy’s mother felt like a reset button had been pushed on her life that said: Start Now.

To ease her heavy burden of having to be the boy’s mother when he was alive, his mother had taken to drinking vodka every night. The boy’s father left when he was five, and from that time on, the boy and his mother ate their dinners in separate rooms. His mother sat in her yellow chair in the living room and the boy sat on the couch in the den. The two rooms were attached, with the TV in the middle. They could watch the same program without actually having to sit in the same room and face each other. They did this night after night, hardly speaking, watching game show after game show until his mother passed out and the boy put her to bed.

After the boy’s father left, there was a string of babysitters. On three occasions, the boy was molested. He told no one. He felt ashamed. He felt it was his fault. The molesters knew that such a shy and withdrawn and disfigured kid would tell no one. He was the perfect target. And they were right.

The boy’s childhood was spent avoiding people. Once he got into high school, he focused on his classes. He wasn’t particularly smart and didn’t get good grades, but he always did his homework because it was a decent way to pass the time. He could have taken up smoking but didn’t because the smell reminded him of the smell of his mother.

The boy had a death wish but wasn’t in danger of killing himself, because he feared pain. He feared directing pain at himself but wasn’t particularly afraid if pain happened to him or if the pain took him by surprise. Once he accidentally smashed his arm through a glass door and didn’t feel the pain because his arm went numb. He didn’t even know he was cut until he saw the blood. Instead of harming himself, the boy found compromising situations to insert himself in, hoping something would happen to him that would accidentally render him unconscious or dead.

With his death wish in mind, the boy set out to the secluded part of the park on a Wednesday in the spring in hopes that he could attract a creep who might take him away in a car. What he found instead were trees and chipmunks and a couple making out by the stream. None of this makes sense, the boy said to himself. Why do some people get lucky while others have such a hard time? The boy didn’t care about the other people who had a hard time. He only cared about the hard time he was having. He walked away from the couple and sat by himself on the swing. A small child asked the boy to push him, and the boy said no and walked away so he could be by himself with his thoughts.

You might be disappointed to know that the boy was not in fact murdered. He actually tripped on a tree root, hit his head on a stone, and fell into the river, where he drowned because no one saw him. Since his parents had not reported him missing, no one was looking for him. Everyone just went on as they always had. The boy lay in the river for days because the weather had been bad and no one was walking along the trail, or if they were, they hadn’t bothered to look at the river in the particular spot where the boy had lain. Someone might have ridden by on a bike, but they would have been going too fast to see the boy’s body in the water.

We’re not to feel sad for the boy because he would have rathered be dead than alive. He didn’t feel pain as his head hit the rock. It was like the glass door—he was in a state of shock and then everything went black. He didn’t even have time to scream. But had he had time to utter a sound, it would have been the word now.

I wrote this story about a boy in the hope that you would find it more interesting than if it had been written about a girl with the same experiences. Really, this is a story about my family and me. Many details have been changed, but most of it is true.

Human Microphone

1.

The other day, I was on a bus that stopped in front of a school and a stream of middle-school-age children boarded.

I’m claustrophobic, so I decided this would be a sign for me to get off immediately and walk home.

When I got to the back door, it was locked.

As more children boarded the bus, I called out to the driver, Could you please open the door? But my voice was drowned out by the laughs and chatter of the excited children who were packing themselves into the bus and swarming all around me.

It was a Friday, and the frenzy of the weekend was in the air.

A kid standing nearby heard me and called out in a booming pubescent voice: Open the door!

Then, in a chain reaction, more students chanted, Open the door! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door!

Their voices increased in volume and formed a human microphone, with their shouts moving quickly from the back to the front of the bus.

But the driver ignored them.

In the next moment, it was like the children were reading my thoughts and saying them out loud to one another.

One said to her friend, Why won’t he open the door?

Another said, He’s not going to open the door.

A third said, What’s she going to do?

What was I going to do? Well, I was having a panic attack for one thing and needed to get off the bus immediately. A therapist once told me that anxiety often arises when we overestimate our danger and underestimate our ability to cope, which was the exact situation I found myself in. But you can’t reason with fear, and this was vying to be my worst panic attack yet.

I shook the door again, and still it wouldn’t budge.

A man standing next to me said, He’ll open the door once all the children have boarded.

Oh, I see, I said, smiling sheepishly. I guess I started something.

He did not smile back. You did, he said.

As more children boarded the bus, there was less room to move or breathe, and my panic really set in. No amount of mindfulness or breathing or positive self-talk would get me out of this. On a scale of one to ten, this was one hundred. I knew it, the children knew it, but the bus driver did not.

Even though it was clear that the door was locked, I shook the handles desperately. And when the children saw my desperation, they once again formed a human microphone.

This time their calls were louder and angrier and had a greater sense of outrage and urgency.

They were serious in their attempts to get the bus driver’s attention, but also they must have delighted in the fact that they were able to scream so loudly and with such demand at an adult on behalf of another adult.

Open the door! they screamed over and over. Open the door! Never have I had anyone in my corner like those kids on that bus.

The bus driver said nothing.

Once the bus was completely packed so that none of us could move, the driver finally opened the back door, and I tumbled out onto the sidewalk, gasping for air.

Have a nice day, ma’am, said one of the most vocal kids, waving as the bus pulled away.

2.

The next day I was at a department store downtown, and the sales clerk would not take back a red sweater I had bought. She claimed the item was final sale even though it did not say final sale on my receipt.

Immediately after I’d bought it, I regretted the decision. I can take it back, I told myself, and thought I’d see how it looked in my own mirror at home. I thought if I tried it on with the right shoes or the right skirt, the sweater would suit me.

It didn’t.

To make matters worse, the sweater was way out of my price range. I paid nearly three hundred dollars for this name-brand sweater. I’d never done such a thing before, and I wasn’t sure what had come over me. In the moment before I bought the sweater, I had wanted it more than I wanted anything else on earth. The urge was so powerful and desperate, I would have done anything to own this item of clothing.

Even though I knew this sweater was out of my price range and would eat up the small amount of credit I had left on my credit card, I clung to the fact that I could return it within thirty days.

I’d meant to go back to the department store the next day but found out that my mother had a gambling addiction and had gotten into a serious amount of debt. I was so preoccupied with what the next few months would look like that I forgot about the sweater and how much I’d paid for it and how much I did not like it, no matter the lighting, no matter the style of my shoe.

It wasn’t until I was straightening up my bedroom that I came across the department store bag under a pile of dirty clothes. My stomach lurched. I checked the receipt and discovered, much to my relief, that this was the last