College me, being college-y (the Hornitos tequila is somewhere in there, I guarantee you)
When I applied to college, I obviously agonized over the application essay. I thought of writing about my grandfather, a Communist organizer during the McCarthy period whom I hadn’t ever really understood, and who had recently died. I thought of writing about teaching English to kids in Costa Rica, and what it feels like to fall in love with a place and its people and its language. I thought of writing about what it was like to become a professional actress at age 13 and then spend the next several years getting rejected over and over and over and over because of my skill or because of my appearance or because of various other reasons that were opaque to me, but which I internalized as massive, insurmountable personal flaws. (Bad. It feels bad).
Later on, after graduation, I got a job with a company called GradeSaver. They only hired Harvard students (at the time, at least), and their company pitch was, basically, “get a Harvard student to help you write your college admissions essay.” (We also wrote Cliffs Notes-style books; I wrote one on The Aeneid that I’m still pretty proud of to this day. Because it is an actual – albeit mediocre – book that explores the themes of an epic Latin poem. It was hard, you guys.)
What I ultimately realized through these various experiences was that it doesn’t matter what you write about. It matters how you write about whatever “it” is, because the meaning always lies in that subterranean layer beneath the words themselves. Or at least it should.
What I wrote my application essay about: How I had lost my imagination. How I remembered being four years old, sitting cross-legged on my floor with My Little Ponies, entire odysseys unspooling in my mind even though all you would have seen was a silent child moving around her dolls. I remembered sitting on the back of my parents’ motorcycles during days-long trips to Canada, hours and hours during which my mind had nothing to occupy itself with except for itself – and god, the things it came up with.
Later on, stories became harder to write. They didn’t just flow into my mind and then out through my fingers; they were arduous. I learned how to play with language and structure and themes, and it was exciting and I loved it, but it was not the same as what I was able to do with those My Little Ponies. But here’s the trick: You don’t write an essay about how you lost your imagination without showing the application committee that hey…it’s ok. That creativity may look different, but it’s still there. Is this a little manipulative? Sure. But at least it’s not boring.
So in partnership with my application essay, I submitted a short story. The intent was to demonstrate that even though I had *lost* that wilder, more innocent version of my imagination, it hadn’t actually disappeared – it had evolved. Here is the story I wrote, which I’m leaving here because I only have one printed-out copy of it, and I just found it in a box of high school papers that my parents had given me when they moved out of our old apartment. In retrospect it’s…you know, it’s okay. It’s heavy-handed with the metaphors and every bone in my body wants to give it an edit, but I’d still like to keep it.
For posterity, or whatever. Maybe you’ll enjoy.
Some Kind Of Wonderful
The early morning felt heavy and wet. The rows of summer houses stood at right angles to one another, enclosing a square of gray, puddle-soaked cement speckled with October grass. Where the row-houses parted to reveal a steeply inclined driveway, the highway was almost visible at the top of the hill. Cars sped by through the wet morning, spraying up jets of spoiled water from under their wheels.
Inside Apartment 105, Mr. and Mrs. Stillman were asleep. Mr. Stillman lolled in a large, faded chair that sat in the corner of the parlor. His head rested in the crook of his elbow, and a needle-thin tendril of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth to the green cloth of his shirt. His wife occupied the bed in the next room. Her legs were twisted around the sheets and her hair was spread out on the pillow like a thicket.
Christine was sitting on the pavement just outside the door of Apartment 105. Her hair was pulled away from her sweaty forehead with a black elastic. She had the beginnings of a headache where the elastic band pulled her hair away too tightly from her scalp. She squirmed and tugged at her yellow t-shirt, pulling at the armholes, which felt terribly constricting in the hot waves rising off the cement. Christine rubbed a smudge of dirt off one knee and kicked off a tiny white sandal. She rested her foot in a patch of brown grass and watched an ant crawl across her toe. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and tried to wish her parents awake. She wanted to go to the beach.
Mr. and Mrs. Stillman had a book titled Romantic Weekend Getaways: New England. The book was filled with pictures of happy couples lounging near lakes, riding rollercoasters at amusement parks, playing in the sand at the beach. Christine had spent countless summer hours poring over the section on Beaches and Bays. Her potato chip-smudgy fingers had traced the words “Dotty’s Landing” so many times that there were little lakes of oil here and there on the pages. She couldn’t read what was written below the title on the page, but the picture accompanying the description of Dotty’s Landing was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
The picture was of a radiant woman wearing a red bathing suit, smiling happily into the camera while her two (obviously) smart and (impossibly) charming children played a game of croquet on a grassy patch nearby. The woman seemed to have a lazy left eye, but her face was so fine, so perfectly crafted, that the flaw was practically unnoticeable.
Christine had gazed at that picture daily for almost three summers now, slowly building up the courage to ask her parents if they could visit Dotty’s Landing one day. She knew that the town where the beach was located was at the most three miles away from the house where she had spend endless summer days observing her parents playing Solitaire and watching Cheers re-runs, and she didn’t see how they couldn’t wish for a day by the ocean, playing in the sand. Christine imagined them: They’d arrive at the beach, and her father would say how soft the sand was. Her mother would wear a hat with a big fake flower on the brim. The woman in the red bathing suit would be sitting there by the patch of grass, and she would get up and walk over to where Christine stood and hug her. She’d introduce herself – Felicity was the woman’s name, and Christine would be Guinevere – and her children would teach their new friend how to play croquet.
And now Christine was on her way. Her beach towels were rolled up neatly in her tote bag. Her bathing suit was already on (and making her itch), and the car keys were laid out for her parents on the table by the door, in case they couldn’t remember where they had put them.
From deep inside the room came a low groan. One of the adults was stirring. She glanced around her at the steaming pavement, the brown grass, and felt guilty even though she wasn’t sure why. She felt a small tickle and looked down to where the ant had proceeded to her ankle. She stroked it with her forefinger.
She heard a shuffling sound from inside the apartment, and her mother began to speak.
“Really, Bob, you look like a fool laying there. Like a big fat old dead thing.”
“And who’s it passed out last night drunk?”
“And so what if I did? You fell asleep in the chair and I had to come get you.”
“At least I’m no drunk.”
“Oh, no? What was it I just smelled on your breath, Bob, chocolate? So you’re cheating on your diet now, too? That’s just so smart. Really, you should win a trophy or something. You should just be a winner.“
Christine twisted around to look behind her, through the screen door and into the living room. Her father lay in the chair, looking like some huge soft insect, glasses askew. Her mother stood above him in a loosely-tied robe, streaks of black makeup making roadmaps down her face. From the nightstand, her mother’s clock radio began playing music.
My baby, she’s alright
My baby, she’s clear outta sight
Yeah, she is some kind of wonderful…
“Barb, turn that goddamn music off! Can’t hear myself think!”
“If you got outta that chair once in awhile you could turn it off your own damn self.”
“If you didn’t get so drunk once in awhile you wouldn’t need the music so loud to wake your drunk ass up!”
Mrs. Stillman clutched her robe around her and stumbled towards the door, coming like a Mack truck, sending her daughter scrambling out of the way of the slamming screen. She tripped over the door-ledge, then steadied herself and rubbed her ear thoughtfully. She asked the little girl sitting on the stoop whether today was the day that the three of them were supposed to go to the beach.
“No,” replied Christine, reaching out a thumb and gently pressing it over where the ant had almost reached her knee. “No, I don’t think it is.”
