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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Yardstick, a Novel Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93b4p2v0 Author Gilbert-Snyder, Pamela Diane Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Yardstick, a Novel A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts by Pamela Diane Gilbert-Snyder June 2014 Thesis Committee: Professor Rob Roberge, Co-Chairperson Professor Andrew Winer, Co-Chairperson Professor Mary Yukari Waters Copyright by Pamela Diane Gilbert-Snyder 2014 The Thesis of Pamela Diane Gilbert-Snyder is approved: _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson _____________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside ! Acknowledgements I wish to thank my professor and thesis advisor Rob Roberge, for his practical, specific, and knowledgeable advice; my professor Mary Yukari Waters, for her insight, perspective, and encouragement; my professor and program director Tod Goldberg, for his professionalism, hilarity, and acceptance to this extremely stimulating and effective program; and my family, Paul, Helena, and Gwendolyn, for their personal sacrifices on my behalf over the past two years, and whose love and support make my life worth living (and writing about). ! iv! Table of Contents Preliminary pages Title page………………………………………………………………….i Copyright page……………………………………………………………ii Signature Approval page………………………………………………….iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………….iv Yardstick, a Novel Chapters No Surprise……………………………………………………………….1 The Appointment…………………………………………………………27 Two Teas………………………………………………………………….44 What Spring Is For………………………………………………………..47 NOLA……………………………………………………………………..65 Two Teas, Continued..…………………………………………………….91 Bright Moments…………………………………………………………...97 Two Teas, Conclusion…………………………………………………….145 ! ! ! v! Summer 1976: No Surprise “Bitch!” Augie said, or something like it. “Get out! You ain’t ridin’ back with me! You can hitchhike back to St. Louis!” I was stunned. But why? I had only myself to blame. Anyone would say so, and as I recall they often did. But what credibility did they have? Most people didn’t even know about these scenes; they would say it regardless. There were plenty of other strikes against Augie, his race being the main one. Still, I had told myself “never again,” yet wound up in this same confounding place, not even sure what was happening or why, just bludgeoned into numbness. Not physically. Never physically, although there was the time he banged my head against a wall (just once or twice), and on the night in question there seemed to be a bruise on my arm where his thumb pressed each time he grabbed me, sat me back down. So not “never,” I suppose. I need to own up to that now, own up to all of it. I wept throughout. I have no memory of that, though. I only know because Reida said it had broken her heart, listening to me from outside the room, where she and the other women of the aborted bachelorette party held guard with a wrench wrapped in a dishtowel. They told me about the wrench afterwards, but they didn’t say why they had it. He must have been doing something that was freaking them out. But I rarely remembered the details of these episodes once they were over. In my otherwise exhaustive journals of the time, I didn’t record even one. “Okay,” I said, hauling myself up, wobbling, not looking his way, “I’ll do that.” Anything to get out of that little room he had led me to at the back of the house. But as ! 1! soon as I got up, he jerked me back down. It happened again and again. I don’t remember much about the room itself. Seems like it was storage or something, lots of stuff piled around. I don’t remember how we got there from the bar, either, where I’d gone with the rest of the ladies after the rehearsal dinner. I know there were four women with me in the booth, Reida and Kelly and two others whose names and faces I’ve forgotten. Why I remember Reida so well even decades later I don’t know, with her sleek dark hair and stylish, body-hugging clothes, rings on every finger clinking against her glass. Augie just materialized next to the booth. He was supposed to be bar-hopping with the boys. I had watched him go off with the groom, Jim—one of his dearest friends, he always said—as I left with the bride, Kelly, and the rest of the girls. How did he even know where we were? But there he was, gripping my elbow. “Let’s go,” he said. I shook my head no, studied my drink. Reida tilted her face up at him. “Augustus, darling, sit down, let’s talk.” And then something new happened. Augie screwed up his lips, fluttered his eyelids, and threw her words back at her, high and mocking, voice thick with alcohol. “Ah-guss-tuss dah-ling, shiddown, lit’s tawk.” (Reida was from London.) A jolt of horror skittered through me. These scenes had always been private before, just us, no one else even overheard—which is why so many people thought me flakey, even cruel (I was with him, then I wasn’t, then I was again …). He was charismatic, interesting, accomplished and beloved, you see—a poet. And not just any poet. In the revolutionary 1970s, when the coming together of blacks and whites was thought to be a good thing, at least among the vanguard, he was one of that rare sought-after breed: a crossover, a black man rising in the ranks of the ! 2! white world (the academic part of it, anyway), a black man whites could relate to. And he adored me. If they knew nothing else about us, they knew that. So I got up and went with him, to keep it from getting worse, to contain it to just me. After that we were in the little room. The bludgeoning was with words. “Runnin’ after some nigger in stack-heeled shoes.” That’s a line I remember. But, no, that was from another time, from Riverside. There was no man there in Boston that night he could accuse me of coming on to, just for happening to stand next to him at the chip-dip bowl, just for happening to speak to the man. Not that Augie’s instincts were entirely wrong in that regard; by then I had probably already begun to hope for a rescuer. “What’d you come here for? They ain’t yo’ friends! They think you stupit!” he said. Augie didn’t normally talk this way. He tended to slip into dialect only when his mood was exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. “You asked me,” I said, one tick above a whisper. “You wanted me to come.” That’s the kind of thing I would hazard to say only early on, before any hope that he could be called back from the depths, see reason, had been crushed. “’Yew assed me, yew assed me.’ Shut up. You a liar. You saw a free trip. ‘Ah never been ta Boston...’” I lowered my stinging eyes, blood rising to my face, hands and armpits sweating (I often grew hot before I went cold). He wasn’t wrong. In those days I took any opportunity to go somewhere I’d never been—especially if it meant escaping my parents’ house, where I was staying that summer—and I never let lack of finances stand in my ! 3! way if I saw a way around it. We had driven to Boston from St. Louis with a friend of his named John from his days at Williams College. John picked us up on his way through from Kansas City and feigned sleep on the passenger side when Augie stuck his arm into the backseat to finger-fuck me as he was driving. I don’t remember who paid for the gas. I doubt it was either of us. “You think you special. You special all right. Slippery-ass hustler.” That was where I started to freeze up. I could feel what was coming. Augie knew me so well, better than anyone ever had (or ever would). And when things escalated to where they did in that little room, he would reach into the core of what mattered to me, the thing I cherished most about myself, clung to as I felt my way blindly through the thicket of my early twenties with no light from behind. He would yank out something I cared about or was sensitive to, ridicule it, destroy it—that seemed to be the point— accuse me of the most heinous deeds and character traits. Usually it boiled down to me being a liar and a whore. And he had already called me a liar. “Mo’er fuckin’ user. Mo’er fuckin’ tease. You been jerkin’ me roun’ long enough. Get out!” I didn’t bother standing up this time. I kept my head down, looked at the floor, tried to lose myself in the blur of my vision. Now Augie leaned in nose-to-nose and lifted my chin with a curled finger. I could feel the nail digging into the triangular hollow between the bones. My eyes were still cast down, seeing nothing. The nail dug deeper. My attention narrowed to that one sharp point. ! 4! “Look at me,” he growled. I raised my zombie eyes to his. “Who you been fuckin’? You tell me. Now.” I held my breath and stared into the eye that couldn’t see, the blind one, focusing on it instinctively like I did at such moments.