Anxiety Constellation
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Georgia College Knowledge Box Creative Nonfiction MFA Theses Masters of Fine Arts Theses Spring 4-24-2019 Anxiety Constellation Leah Kuenzi [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://kb.gcsu.edu/nonfiction Part of the Nonfiction Commons Recommended Citation Kuenzi, Leah, "Anxiety Constellation" (2019). Creative Nonfiction MFA Theses. 4. https://kb.gcsu.edu/nonfiction/4 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Masters of Fine Arts Theses at Knowledge Box. It has been accepted for inclusion in Creative Nonfiction MFA Theses by an authorized administrator of Knowledge Box. Anxiety Constellation A thesis presented to The Graduate Faculty of The College of Arts and Sciences Department of English Georgia College & State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Leah Kuenzi April 2019 Anxiety Constellation by Leah Kuenzi Dr. ��Kerry Neville, Committee --Member -=-----=----- Date Dr. Allen Gee, Outside Reader Date f/zf/;r Dale I Dr. Eric G. Tenbus Date'/-'J-7-- /J Dean, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Acknowledgements An earlier version of “Anxiety Constellation” was published in Issue 7.2 of New Delta Review. “My Mother and Other Doctors” was published in Issue 9 of The Lindenwood Review. I am grateful to Allen Gee, who helped me develop this collection in its early stages, and to Cecilia Woloch, who helped me get it over the finish line. iii Contents Anxiety Constellation 1 Mother Roots 16 My Father in the Key of Mystery 28 The Perfectly Sculpted Elegant Bohemian Messy Faux 38 Feminist Updo Poems About Death 50 My Father Teaches Table Manners 53 My Mother and Other Doctors 65 At The County Dump 79 Looking for Trouble 93 My Mother’s Breaking Heart 106 Unpacking My Father 111 When I Clean My House I Disappear 126 iv Anxiety Constellation When I was in second grade, we had to create flipbooks showing the different parts of a flower, each part listed on a different note card accented in red crayon, its name recorded in my sloppy childhood scrawl: 1. Pistil 2. Stigma 3. Stamen 4. Style 5. Anther 6. Filament 7. Sepal It was an ongoing project that was completed bit-by-bit each day. The flowers I drew never looked right: each sepal out of proportion to the other, the petals drooping, the style too narrow. My hand refused to reproduce the sample drawing in the workbook with any accuracy. Instead of making progress, I spent day after day re-drawing each part, quietly crumpling each ruined drawing into a tiny ball. I soon realized that I’d never finish before the end of the quarter. My parents had divorced earlier that year and my father lived in the next town over. My brother Hans and I stayed with him on the weekends. I remember one Saturday morning sitting on the floor of my father’s bedroom, hugging my knees to my chest and sobbing to him over my 1 fears about the school project. What would happen if I didn’t finish? Would I be punished? Shamed by my teachers? Kicked out of school? I told him that I couldn’t do it right, no matter how hard I tried. He called my teachers, and in a conference, the adults in my life shared their bafflement about how much anxiety was contained within my small body. Every surface of my mother’s house was covered in her notes-to-self, oddly-shaped scraps of paper taped to everything: the microwave, the refrigerator, the back door. These notes reminded her to take the trash out or follow-up at the bank about a discrepancy she found when balancing her checkbook. She reminded herself to make dentist appointments and call her parents. She was always sighing, remembering something else that needed her attention, rummaging for a pen, and making a new note. Sometimes she even taped a note on her glass of water. She was walking out of the kitchen, perhaps, and didn’t want to forget that she had put the oven on to pre-heat. For a while, there were scraps of paper torn from a pad of yellow legal paper taped to the floor-to-ceiling windows in our family room; just below those windows, my mother had set up several containers of bell pepper seeds, planted inside recycled tofu containers, to germinate. It was the sunniest spot in the house. At night, with the moon shining through the windows, the little bits of paper looked like stars in a vast constellation. It is strange to me now that I would have confided in my father the worry I felt over that school project when it was my mother who picked us up each day and asked, “How was school?” Maybe I assumed at the time that my mother had enough on her plate, and couldn’t take on any of my worries. 2 What would it have taken for me, at the early age of seven, to turn away from that tug of irrational concern over the little things? How could I have learned to just draw the damn plant, finishing what I started without also succumbing to the gnawing feeling in my stomach? When I was a child, my mother kept an index card inscribed with the social security numbers of my father, herself, me, and my brother–listed in her neat handwriting as Mauri, Janet, Leah, Hans – tucked away in her purse. She didn’t know what she’d need this information for— an intake form at the emergency room or to file a missing person’s report, perhaps. Maybe it wouldn’t be needed for anything at all. But it’s better to be safe than sorry. In the final months of 1999, the Y2K apocalypse was imminent, and Mom prepared by making a sofa from stacked containers of nonperishable foods. Smaller shoeboxes full of brown rice made the arms, and larger crates of black beans and canned vegetables formed the seats. She covered it with throw pillows and a floral sheet. You could hardly tell it was actually a form of defense against impending doom, and not a couch at all. Concealment was the goal: when the looting started, maybe our bare pantry would be taken at face value, and our foodstuffs spared from theft, hidden in plain sight among the common landscape of our furniture. She had a wood burning stove installed in our basement and stashed 25 pound sacks of red lentils in pillowcases. I sometimes cried at night, trying to fall asleep as I pictured shadowy figures rummaging through our house and taking all our stuff. She did her best to soothe and comfort me but couldn’t tell me that everything would be okay. It probably wouldn’t, she said, and it was better to be safe than sorry. Y2K turned out to be nothing, but there was always some new source for my mother’s worry. The dental insurance company was slow to send reimbursement for my wisdom teeth extraction, and so my mother was certain it would never come at all. The pilot light on the water 3 heater continuously burned out, and this indicated that the whole unit was dying. George W. Bush’s war machine was going to kill us all. The tractor was making a weird noise. The lettuce crop wasn’t thriving. Financial aid for my brother and me to attend college was unlikely. My mother’s worrying was a vast web, its spinning a constant activity, whose sticky threads grabbed at me and clung to my arms. One of the first lists I remember making was of possible names for the cat I adopted when I was eleven years old. I wrote them all out in a stream of consciousness – Carl, Phil, Pantera, Panther, Salem, Fluffy and so on. Then I wrote them in a new order, ranking them from favorite to least favorite. I crossed things off and added new ideas. I narrowed it down to two possibilities, then circled my final choice and wrote it in big letters on top of the piece of paper. How orderly and lovely the whole thing seemed: I wanted to find the best name for my cat, and I’d done it, just like that. I called him Pantera – Tera for short – and started making lists of everything. I made a list of friends to invite to my fourteenth birthday party and a list of the snacks and food I wanted to serve. I studied for a geography test by copying down the names of all the countries in Africa in alphabetical order. I bought my first day planner in middle school and charted my daily homework assignments. I woke up on Saturday mornings and reached for the small notebook on my bedside table to plan out my day: call Brittany, write a letter to Jennifer, clean bathroom sink, mall with Kara, edits to English essay. I marked through each item with a silvery gel pen when it had been accomplished. At first, the list was my friend. It always made me feel better. 4 Over time, though, the lists got longer; the items harder to complete as the incessant demands of adulthood overwhelmed me. The summer after I graduated from college, I had no job lined up. I arranged my few skills and larger number of interests into various configurations using online search engines. Reading through each job listing, I gave in to self-pity, and considered the possibility of spending my life watching The Food Network from morning ‘til night.