What’s worse than spotting a quarter-sized spider on the ceiling above your bed as you turn out the light?

Instantly switching the lamp back on to discover he’s gone.

How will you know in the morning he didn’t crawl out the window? The idiotic scenario your half-asleep partner tried to sell as you high-stepped on the mattress clutching a paper towel?

Each itchy red bite on your shoulder will have two tiny punctures, not one.

Spider-fun-fact.

When I was about six, and we still lived at Barnstead, the house my parents built by renovating a barn, there were plenty of creatures that bit, stung, or were just generally gross when hopping across the wide wood planks of my bedroom floor at night. Knowing the distinction was a matter of experience in which we kids took pride. When the neighbors invited cousins from Baltimore to visit (kids with very white feet, who called minnies “minnows”), those interlopers got more side-eye than sympathy upon shrieking, “I got bit by a bee!”

“Bit by a bee,” we’d repeat with an eye-roll.

The first time I was bitten at the Barn I was about five, playing out by the white wood rail fence that led down to the river. I’d seen a soft tunnel of mounded dirt and had decided, as one does, to poke a stick in it. Only a few inches down, I encountered a soft gray vole. Delighted with my find, I picked the creature up, and it promptly sunk its tiny, beaver-like teeth into my thumb. I yelped in disbelief—unable to reconcile my harmless intentions with the unwarranted aggression. I ran back to the house to show my mother my wound, but she barely glanced from the kitchen sink. She was seldom alarmed if you still had a pulse.

Our cat was a biter, too. Kimmie was a demented Siamese who liked to hide under the Early American sofa skirt at bedtime, lying in wait for bare, little-girl feet to make a run across the braided rug for the stairs. She’d streak out from her hiding place, wrap her front legs around the closest bare ankle, and sink her teeth in, back claws thrumming and latched on with the diabolical tenacity of an ankle monitor.

We talked about the possibility of being bitten by a snake; there were plenty of them in the pasture and pine woods (and one in the clothes dryer), and I often wondered if I’d actually suck the venom out of my sister’s leg should such a crisis arise or alternatively, thank her for her model horse collection and take off for the house.

But the worst biting incident was our own dog and one of the neighbor’s visiting cousins. Stormy was a German Shepherd pup named for my father’s dog as a boy growing up in Illinois—the loyal companion who, badly injured, had waited for Dad to return home from school to die.

My mother was walking our Stormy on a leash, on our own beach, when a little girl visiting from next door, crossed the property line uninvited, rushed up to the dog, and reached out to touch his face.

Startled, not yet thoroughly socialized, and perhaps protective of my mother on the other end of the lead, Stormy instinctively snapped at the child, leaving a bite just below her eye.

Chaos ensued. Face wounds bleed a lot. The neighbors threw the wailing child in a car to make a mad dash for the hospital; the fan belt broke, it was a hot July afternoon, and I don’t know how she finally got there. Pretty sure she needed stitches, and we needed a lawyer we didn’t have when her parents sued. We needed money we couldn’t spare when they won $600 and a demand that our dog, on a leash, on his own property, be put down.

I would come to see my mother cry three more times before I was 12, before we moved from the river. But the first time you see a parent cry is the worst, I think.  When they took Stormy away, Mom told me he was going to police school, but she wouldn’t let me see her face when she said it.

It’s a funny thing how mothers will literally throw themselves in front of a moving train to save their child, but there is less written about what a child would do to save her mother. To make her happy. To never see her cry again.

She might take on a profession she would not have otherwise considered. She might live in a town she’d rather leave. She might live her life on a river and always wonder about mountains. She might marry a young man with the right stuff Mom approved of and wonder what happened to the bad boy with the six-string guitar and gold Mustang. The boy leaving for Scotland who wanted her to skip college and come with him.

It’s a rite of passage, I guess. Coming to be grateful for your parents’ influence. Realizing parents cry, mothers’ hearts break. That you will one day want to protect the one who protected you.

When I was newly married and very young, I used to imagine that my husband and my mother were both drowning, and I could only save one. I agonized over my choice.

I know, I know. Who does this???

I felt this was a test I had to pass—a question to which I had to know the answer. I felt as if I had to break my heart open to see who resided there.

I am less black and white these days, and the heart’s occupancy and weight restrictions are without limitations.

No matter who resides there now, dear reader, no matter how many people you love and how many love you, for all of us, there first was a mother.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

 

Can you feel me staring at you as you sleep? You are as still as my pink robe tossed at the foot of the bed. You are not even dreaming by the look of it.

I’m gazing at you with more intrigue than resentment, although that may be a lie. Not only are you sound asleep, oblivious to my scrutiny, but you were unconscious 30 seconds after your (stupid) head hit the pillow.

Sorry. That was immature.

I’m tired, and I’m envious. And I’m ascribing to you all kinds of virtues that may be unwarranted. It just seems as if you should have at least a few things to worry about, be mentally replaying at least a few cringeworthy moments.

I love the warmth of your shoulder near mine, but let’s face it. That head doesn’t contain much except “come,” “treat,” and “squirrel,” in reverse order. I’ll take you for a walk in the morning and try not to disturb you as I turn over.

The primary reason I can’t sleep is this persistent ache in my left glute, for which I’m trying various remedies. A spinal injection and a month of intense acupuncture haven’t helped enough, so I’m thinking about massage, which I’m afraid I will love too much.

In search of additional sleep remedies, I’ve been asking friends what they do to fall asleep. My friend Joe doesn’t monkey around with the mind monkeys—he goes straight for the drugs. Unisom is his friend.

A guy in the waiting room at acupuncture swears the key is counting backward from 498. I like that he has a specific starting point that clearly is no one else’s.

Till now.

I want to ask him why we are using 498, but he already has his shoes on and is heading out as I’m heading in.

My friend Haley has recently discovered a sure-fire method: seeing how many words she can make from a single word. She is way too excited about this.

Like monkey-mind. There’s key, monk, on, oink, din, mind, in, dim. Are you sleeping? Like  gratitude. There’s read, it, are, rate, great, dear, due, rag…still awake.

So, I’ve come up with my own method. It’s making a list of what if’s?

If I’d been the first-born girl instead of the last in my family, I would have no girl skills and standards at all.

If I had not gone on a blind date when I was 19, I would not have my three children. I’d have other children, no doubt, but who wants those?

If I had married my sophomore-year boyfriend, Will, I’d have been a widow at 55.

If Sue D. hadn’t majored in drama the year I majored in drama, I would not have changed majors.

If I had not had an offer to work for a magazine the same day I was accepted to graduate school in pastoral counseling, I’d have been a therapist, not a writer. And yes…I do question whether there’s much of a difference, you memoirists.

If I had not volunteered at the SPCA, my solitary heart would not have been rescued by the warm body sleeping belly up in my bed.

But backing the camera up, if my 10^th great-grandfather had not transferred passage from the leaking Speedwell to the Mayflower in September 1620, I might not have been born in America.

If the planet Theia had not hit proto-Earth with a glancing blow 4.5 billion years ago, we would not have seasons and a moon.

If we didn’t have a moon to slow us, an Earth day would still be 19.5 hours as it was a billion years ago.

No full moons, Harvest Moons, Wolf Moons.

No moon rivers.

If I had gone to visit my mother more when she was in assisted living, perhaps I’d sleep better at night.

How many words can I make from regret?

How many from love?

Some words are indivisible.

Like me, beloveds. Like you.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Note: On June 5 Laura Oliver and Andrew Oliver will be reading stories as part of the Spy Night Series at the Avalon Theatre. Doors open at 6:00 pm

I leave at 3:20, having not yet taught myself to check the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge hours before any intention to cross it, and so, already marginally late to my college reunion—and this is a big year for my class—I am stopped bumper to bumper. It takes me an hour to creep along the next six miles to the bridge for no reason other than rain and rush hour on a Friday. I have another hour to drive beyond that.

I’m good at immediately accepting the things I can’t change without handwringing or complaint, which is true tonight. I ease forward a few feet to escape the Barker Paint Company van and turn up the music. The smell of weed emanates so virulently through closed windows I’ll be high before Centreville if we remain in these lanes neck and neck. I glance over, and the driver smiles, raises his eyebrows, and nods laconically. The minutes I could be reuniting with my class are evaporating. I put a book on Audible and wait it out.

When I arrive an hour and a half late, in the pouring rain, the building is locked. I can see my classmates inside, sitting at round tables, wine and appetizers before them, listening to a speaker, but the door won’t budge. This is starting to feel dangerously like metaphor, and my equanimity is cracking. I mutter, “Maybe I just wasn’t supposed to be here tonight,” but I say it with a self-pitying pout. Aware of this, I circle the building looking for another way in, knowing that, too, is metaphor for my college experience; only my exclusion then was self-imposed.

Eventually, I find an open door and there is someone to greet me with my nametag on a lariat. I slip into the nearest seat, gazing longingly at the bar and caterer’s spread behind the speaker. The shrimp cocktail looks fresh, and a glass of Pinot Noir wouldn’t hurt. I look around the room and can identify no one. The only person I might recognize, my boyfriend from freshman year, I know immediately, isn’t here. He is six foot 4. He’d stand out even sitting down.

When the speaker concludes, everyone rises and mingles and that’s when I start to recognize classmates. Debbie’s kind eyes, Paula’s megawatt-Midwestern smile. I’m casually looking for my friend, and anyone I ask says, “Oh, he was just here!” As late as I was, perhaps he thought I wasn’t coming. I keep looking.

The greatest thrill is to look up and see my freshman-year roommate for the first time since graduation. She was a better friend to me than I to her and that has grieved me. I was a loner and had never shared a room in my life. I don’t know if I literally drew a line down the middle when we moved in, but I may have.

She looks exactly as I would imagine and has the same ready laugh. She got married at 39 and had a baby at 45, she reports. We do the math to see if we should introduce him to my youngest daughter.

“I hear you became a writer,” someone says. “I remember you wanted to be one,” and I say, “I have been lucky. That’s a dream that came true.” At the expense of other dreams, but I don’t add that.

I continue to ask for my friend. “He was here a second ago,” I hear again. “He’s wearing black.” A minute later, I hear, “He was over there by the doors. He’s wearing gray.” See how fast our witnessing becomes perspective, not fact? Was he here at all?

Everyone else has come for the entire weekend, so they are going to reconvene at a bar on High Street to get the party really started. I am driving home—back across the rainy bridge. I won’t be back for the game tomorrow. I have seen what I wanted to see, experienced, and discovered what I longed to know. We are okay. We turned out all right.

And as I drive back, I realize I’m not at the bar tonight because I’m still a non-joiner—a writer who observes as she participates–whose picture was somehow omitted from our yearbook, so there’s no record of me having been here though one of my professors attended my wedding. Why didn’t I drive to Florida with Paula on Spring Break? Go to more parties? Cheer at lacrosse games?

We are who we were, I think, as I hit the bridge. But shouldn’t life have changed us? Are you now who you were then?

My missing friend calls me the next day. “Where are you?” I ask, not “Where were you,” because that doesn’t matter now. Once again, I’m quick to let go of unchangeable loss. “I was late,” I explain, “I drove for hours, but I came, and I looked for you.”

“I’m in Connecticut,” he says, “I had to get outta there. Too many old people.”

We laugh. Exchange updates on our families. I ask about his wife, their kids, and how they spend their days. We plan to meet next year though we may not. Anything could happen between now and then.

Reencountering the past leaves me wistful. You never know when you see someone, whether you will ever see them again. Only our future selves recognize last times as last times.

But I am smiling as I write this, and I know what I would have said had I joined my classmates at that High Street bar. Had I been someone I’m not.

I would have raised a glass and hugged the person closest to me. I’d have said,” I’m so glad that I came tonight, I’m so happy to see everyone!”

And I would be thinking: because in spite of myself, you feel like my family.

And I wish that I’d known you.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.