Tiny Beautiful Things (7 page)

And that is the gift of my life.

Long after she was dead, it was her words and conduct that formed the bridge I teetered across to heal the wounds my father had made. That’s the gift you have to give your child, regardless of how your baby’s father decides to conduct himself, regardless if he ever steps up and becomes the father to your son or daughter he should be. It’s what most of us have to give a few times over the course of our lives: to love with a mindfully clear sense of purpose, even when it feels outrageous to do so. Even when you’d rather put on your steel-toed boots and scream.

Give it. You won’t regret it. It will come out in the reckoning.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I’m in my early twenties. I’ve been in a serious relationship with the same guy for six years—on and off (the “off” portion taking place when I was younger). I have been very distracted and have been second-guessing the relationship for a while now, but I can’t come to grips with losing this person that seems to be right for me permanently—and of course I don’t want to break his heart. Then again, I don’t want to settle and have regrets later in life. I feel like we want different things out of life and we have different interests, but I just can’t decide. I have talked to him about my feelings, but to no avail. We went on a little “break,” but breaks never work
.

My biggest fear is being alone and never finding anyone that measures up. It doesn’t help that my closest friends are settling down with their boyfriends and are talking about marriage. Please help, Sugar!

Sincerely,
Scared & Confused

Dear Scared & Confused,

I lived in London when I was twenty. I was technically homeless and desperately broke, but I didn’t have the papers an
American needs to get a job in London, so I spent most of my time walking the streets searching for coins that people had dropped. One day, a man in a business suit approached and asked me if I wanted an under-the-table job three days a week at a major accounting firm that has since collapsed due to corruption.

“Sure,” I said.

And this is how I became
coffee girl one two three
.

Coffee girl
was my actual job title. The
one two three
was tacked on to communicate the fact that I was responsible for providing fresh and hot coffee and tea to all the accountants and secretaries who worked on the first three floors of the building. It was a harder job than you might think. “Coffee girl,” men would call as I passed them with my tray, often snapping their fingers to draw my attention their way. I wore a black skirt over white tights and a black vest over a white shirt and I was almost always out of breath. Banned from the elevator, I had to race up and down steps in a stairwell that ran along the back of the building to get from one floor to the next.

That stairwell was my sanctuary, the only place where nobody snapped their fingers and called me coffee girl. During my breaks I walked down to the first floor and went outside and sat on a patch of concrete that edged the building that housed the major accounting firm that has since collapsed due to corruption. One day while I was sitting there, an old woman came along and asked me where in America I was from and I told her and she said that years before she’d visited the place in America where I’m from and we had a nice conversation, and each day after that she came along during the time when I was sitting on the patch of concrete and we talked.

She wasn’t the only person who came to talk to me. I was in love with someone at the time. In fact, I was married to that someone. And I was in way over my head. At night after I made love to this man I would lie beside him and cry because I knew that I loved him and that I couldn’t bear to stay with him because I wasn’t ready to love only one person yet and I knew that if I left him I would die of a broken heart and I would kill him of a broken heart too and it would be over for me when it came to love because there would never be another person who I’d love as much as I loved him or who loved me as much as he loved me or who was as sweet and sexy and cool and compassionate and good through and through. So I stayed. We looked for coins on the streets of London together. And sometimes he would come and visit me at the major accounting firm that has since collapsed due to corruption while I was on my breaks.

One day he came while the old woman was there. My husband and the old woman had never come at the same time, but I had told him about her—detailing the conversations I’d had with her—and I had told her about him too. “Is this your husband?” the old woman exclaimed with jubilant recognition when he walked up, and she shook his hand with both of her hands and they chatted for a few minutes and then she left. The man I loved was silent for a good while, giving the old woman time to walk away, and then he looked at me and said with some astonishment, “She has a bundle on her head.”

“She has a bundle on her head?” I said.

“She has a bundle on her head,” he said back.

And then we laughed and laughed and laughed so hard it might to this day still be the time I laughed the hardest. He was right.
He was right!
That old woman, all that time,
all through the conversations we’d had as I sat on the concrete patch, had had an enormous bundle on her head. She appeared perfectly normal in every way but this one: she wore an impossible three-foot tower of ratty old rags and ripped-up blankets and towels on top of her head, held there by a complicated system of ropes tied beneath her chin and fastened to loops on the shoulders of her raincoat. It was a bizarre sight, but in all my conversations with my husband about the old woman, I’d never mentioned it.

She has a bundle on her head!
we shrieked to each other through our laughter on the patch of concrete that day, but before long I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was crying. I cried and cried and cried as hard as I’d laughed. I cried so hard I didn’t go back to work. My job as
coffee girl one two three
ended right then and there.

“Why are you crying?” asked my husband as he held me.

“Because I’m hungry,” I said, but it wasn’t true. It was true that I was hungry—during that time we never had enough money or enough food—but it wasn’t the reason I was crying. I was crying because there was a bundle on the old woman’s head and I hadn’t been able to say that there was and because I knew that that was somehow connected to the fact that I didn’t want to stay with a man I loved anymore but I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge what was so very obvious and so very true.

That was such a long time ago, Scared & Confused, but it all came back when I read your letter. It made me think that perhaps that moment delivered me here to say this to you: You have a bundle on your head, sweet pea. And though that bundle may be impossible for you to see right now, it’s entirely visible to me. You aren’t torn. You’re only just afraid. You no longer
wish to be in a relationship with your lover even though he’s a great guy. Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay. Leaving this man you’ve been with for six years won’t be easy, but you’ll be okay and so will he. The end of your relationship with him will likely also mark the end of an era of your life. In moving into this next era there are going to be things you lose and things you gain.

Trust yourself. It’s Sugar’s golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I write like a girl. I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor. And that’s when I can write, which doesn’t happen to be true anymore
.

Right now, I am a pathetic and confused young woman of twenty-six, a writer who can’t write. I am up late asking you a question, really questioning myself. I’ve sat here, at my desk, for hours, mentally immobile. I look up people I used to love and wonder why they never loved me. I lie facedown on my bed and feel scared. I get up, go to the computer, feel worse
.

David Foster Wallace called himself a failed writer at twenty-eight. Several months ago, when depression hooked its teeth into me, I complained to my then-boyfriend about how I’ll never be as good as Wallace; he screamed at me on Guerrero Street in San Francisco, “STOP IT. HE KILLED HIMSELF, ELISSA. I HOPE TO GOD YOU ARE NEVER LIKE HIM.”

I understand women like me are hurting and dealing with self-trivialization, contempt for other, more successful people, misplaced compassion, addiction, and depression, whether they are writers or not. Think of the canon of women writers: a unifying theme is that so many of their careers ended in suicide. I often
explain to my mother that to be a writer/a woman/a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than
this.”
She pleads with me: Can’t it be different?

Can it? I want to jump out the window for what I’ve boiled down to is one reason: I can’t write a book. But it’s not that I want to die so much as have an entirely different life. I start to think that I should choose another profession—as Lorrie Moore suggests, “movie star/astronaut, a movie star/missionary, a movie star/kindergarten teacher.” I want to throw off everything I’ve accumulated and begin as someone new, someone better
.

I don’t have a bad life. I didn’t have a painful childhood. I know I’m not the first depressed writer. “Depressed writer”—because the latter is less accurate, the former is more acute. I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression.”

That said, I’m high-functioning—a high-functioning head case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness. And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked
.

How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?

Sincerely,
Elissa Bassist

Dear Elissa Bassist,

When I was twenty-eight I had a chalkboard in my living room. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote,
“The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor
, and on the other side I wrote,
“She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty
.

The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel
The Optimist’s Daughter
, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was a book I read again and again, and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. I sat like that too. Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book.
My
book. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling.

That I hadn’t written the book by the time I was twenty-eight was a sad shock to me. Of myself, I’d expected greater things. I was a bit like you then, Elissa Bassist. Without a book, but not entirely without literary acclaim. I’d won a few grants and awards, published a couple of stories and essays. These minor successes stoked the grandiose ideas I had about what I would achieve and by what age I would achieve it. I read voraciously. I practically memorized the work of writers I loved. I
recorded my life copiously and artfully in my journals. I wrote stories in feverish, intermittent bursts, believing they’d miraculously form a novel without my having to suffer too much over it.